Looting broke out as police and demonstrators in Barcelona clashed for a fifth night on Saturday, with thousands hitting the streets across Spain in protest against the jailing of a controversial rapper. Angry demonstrations first erupted on Tuesday after police detained Pablo Hasel, 32, and took him to jail to start serving a nine-month sentence in a highly contentious free-speech case.
Since then, protesters have turned out every night, clashing with police in disturbances which began in Hasel’s home region of Catalonia, but have since spread to Madrid and beyond.
Ahead of the rallies, police were out en masse to head off any of the violence that has marred earlier protests, with dozens of police vans lining the streets of Madrid and Barcelona. Several thousand demonstrators began gathering at about 7pm in Barcelona, and clashes broke out as they started marching toward the police headquarters.
Photo: Reuters
Protesters hurled bottles, cans and firecrackers at police, who charged at them as smoke poured into the air from burning barricades, an Agence France Presse correspondent said.
Others smashed their way into shops along Barcelona’s glitzy 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 that nine people had been arrested at demonstrations across Catalonia, six of them in Barcelona, and the region’s emergency services said six people had been injured, two in Barcelona.
In Madrid, about 400 people gathered under a heavy police presence in the city center, chanting and clapping as curious shoppers stopped to watch.
“Free Pablo Hasel!” they yelled as a helicopter flew overhead and at least 17 police vans could be seen lined up along Gran Via, Madrid’s busiest shopping street.
Earlier several hundreds had gathered in the southern cities of Malaga, Cordoba and Seville, local media reported, with another 100 protesters gathering in the northern city of Santander and a similar number in Logrono.
So far, more than 100 people have been arrested in the protests over Hasel, and scores more injured in the clashes, among them many police officers and a young woman who lost an eye after being hit by a foam round fired by police.
Some say that the third time’s a charm. Not so for SpaceX, whose unmanned rocket on Wednesday exploded on the ground after carrying out what had seemed to be a successful flight and landing — fresh on the heels of two fiery crashes. It was yet another flub involving a prototype of the Starship rocket, which SpaceX hopes one day to send to Mars. “A beautiful soft landing,” a SpaceX commentator said on a live broadcast of the test flight, although flames were coming out at the bottom and crews were trying to put them out. The rocket exploded a few minutes later,
LEGAL ORDEAL: The heavy caseload involving 47 defendants and the vagaries of a Beijing-imposed security law made it difficult for the court to rule on bail requests Dozens of Hong Kong democracy advocates charged with subversion yesterday returned to court to complete a marathon bail hearing that was adjourned overnight when four defendants were rushed to hospital after hours of legal wrangling. Police on Sunday arrested 47 of the territory’s best-known dissidents for “conspiracy to commit subversion” in the broadest use yet of a sweeping National Security Law that Beijing imposed on the territory last year. The defendants represent a broad cross-section of Hong Kong’s opposition, from veteran former pro-democracy lawmakers to academics, lawyers, social workers and youth advocates. Hundreds of supporters gathered outside a courthouse on Monday for the
The plane laden with vaccines had just rolled to a stop at Santiago’s airport in late January and Chilean President Sebastian Pinera was beaming. “Today is a day of joy, emotion and hope,” he said. The source of that hope: China — a country that Chile and dozens of other nations are depending on to help rescue them from the COVID-19 pandemic. China’s vaccine diplomacy campaign has been a surprising success: It has pledged about 500 million doses of its vaccine to more than 45 countries, according to a country-by-country tally by The Associated Press (AP). With just four of China’s many
Sarong-like cloths strung out on lines might seem innocuous, but long-held superstitions around women’s clothes appear to have stopped security forces in their tracks as they move to quell an uprising against a coup by the junta in Myanmar. The country has been in an uproar since the military ousted the civilian government and seized power on Feb. 1, triggering mass protests that the junta has sought to quash with increasingly lethal force. They have used tear gas, stun grenades, rubber bullets and sometimes live rounds against protesters, who are responding with imaginative tactics of their own. The latest involves hanging women’s undergarments
RSS