Rapper’s arrest triggers widespread protests in Spain
Police and demonstrators in Barcelona clashed for a fifth night on Saturday, with thousands taking to the streets across Spain to protest against the jailing of a controversial rapper for glorifying terrorism and insulting royalty in his music and on Twitter.
Thousands gathered in Barcelona on Saturday; including families and elderly protesters at the city’s Plaça Universitat, where a rally began peacefully.
After passing another square, called Plaça Urquinaona, police began beating protesters.
Mossos d’Esquadra — the Catalan police force — said in a tweet that they rerouted the protests and that a group of demonstrators split from the main crowd, attacking the Barcelona stock exchange before vandalizing and looting shops.
Protesters hurled bottles, cans, and firecrackers at police, who charged at them as smoke poured into the air from burning barricades.
Others smashed their way into shops along Barcelona’s Passeig de Gracia shopping avenue, looting stores such as Nike, Versace, Tommy Hilfiger, Hugo Boss, and Diesel.
They also attacked the Barcelona stock exchange building and torched several motorbikes.
The Mossos d’Esquadra regional police said nine people had been arrested at demonstrations across Catalonia, six of them in Barcelona. The region’s emergency services said six people had been injured, two in Barcelona.
Hasél; whose full name is Pablo Rivadulla Duró; missed a deadline earlier this month; to surrender to police to serve a nine-month jail term handed down in 2018, when he was convicted over lyrics and tweets that compared Spanish judges to Nazis and called former King Juan Carlos a mafia boss. He also made references to the Basque separatist paramilitary group known as ETA, which sought independence from Spain.
Instead, Hasél barricaded himself in a university in the Catalan city of Lleida before he was eventually arrested and jailed.
“Tomorrow it could be you,” he tweeted before he was imprisoned and after retweeting the lyrics that he was convicted for.
“We cannot allow them to dictate to us what to say, what to feel, and what to do,” he added.
Hasél also tweeted about members of the now-defunct Basque separatist organization; Eta; which during four decades of violence killed at least 853 people in a campaign of car bombings and shootings.
Amnesty International and Spanish celebrities; such as Javier Bardem and Pedro Almodóvar; say Hasél’s sentence – and other jailings – are having a chilling effect on freedom of speech in the country.
