Barcelona, Spain

A Spanish police offer who posted a misleading video clip suggestive of a sexual assault in July 2019, has been sentenced to 15 months in prison and told to pay a fine of €1,620 ($1627). A court in Barcelona on Tuesday convicted a Guardia Civil officer for an offence against fundamental rights and public freedoms while pointing out that he stirred up hatred against migrant children living in Spain.

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According to Spanish law, custodial sentences of less than two years are not served by first-time offenders. The defendant police officer will thereby avoid his time in prison. The court ordered him to undertake a human rights and anti-discrimination course and to refrain from posting defamatory comments on social media.

What was the case all about?

In July 2019, a few days after a woman was allegedly raped by two migrant minors living in a reception centre, the Guardia Civil officer posted a video on his Twitter account that he said showed a young Moroccan migrant raping a woman in Canet de Mar, a town near Barcelona. The video was watched almost 21,000 times.

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The video, however, was from China, and showed a woman being beaten and sexually assaulted.

“Here’s a video of the Moroccan mena (a derogatory term for unaccompanied minors) in Canet de Mar, one of the ones who we will end up paying for until he’s 23,” read the post. The officer also wrote that the attack by “lunatics and packs of Moroccans” were being ignored by the media.

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Prosecutors claimed that the defendant’s account was full of racist and xenophobic material. They had initially sought a two-year sentence.

“Driven by his animosity towards, and rejection of, foreign immigrants of Moroccan origin, he published a tweet and a video showing an apparent rape committed by two minors in an effort to smear them by associating them in a general manner with violent acts and sexual assaults,” the Barcelona court said while handing over the quantum of sentence to the defendant. 

(With inputs from agencies)

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