BARCELONA, Spain (AP) –
A fifth night of peaceful protests to denounce the incarceration of a Spanish rap artist again resulted in clashes between police and members of fringe groups who set up street barricades and destroyed shop windows in central Barcelona on Saturday night.
Small groups, mostly made up of young people, began their nighttime game of cat and mouse with officers an hour after several thousand protesters gathered in the capital of Spain’s Catalonia region, where the worst violence also took place during earlier demonstrations this week about rapper . Pablo Hasél’s detention
Police were also pelted by rocks after a march in the Catalan city of Lleida, where Hasél barricaded a university building for 24 hours before police took him to serve a 9-month sentence for insulting the Spanish monarchy and praise terrorist violence in his music. .
Catalonia’s regional police said there was also backlash in the city of Tarragona, where groups threw glass bottles at police lines and smashed shop windows.
Police reported at least 11 arrests, including three minors, as of Saturday. The worst of the riots took place on Barcelona’s Passeig de Gràcia, the city’s most fashionable shopping boulevard with art-deco apartment buildings considered architectural treasures.
Mobs make their way into the street, smashing the windows of the shop, dropping motorcycles and setting up barricades with metal street barriers and burning dumpsters to slow the police chase. Some even took up police lines, forcing officers to use shields to protect them from hurled rocks. Police said they identified a “young person” who had been targeting a police helicopter with a laser for two hours.
After gushing out of armored vans, police wielded batons and fired foam bullets to disperse the groups.
The condition appears to have arisen from a marginal group of mostly younger people who made up a small fraction of the thousands of participants who took part in marches to support Hasél and oppose the Spanish laws used to prosecute him.
About 90 people have been arrested and more than 100 people have been injured since Hasél’s arrest on Tuesday.
Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau appealed for calm.
“Defending freedom of speech in no way justifies the destruction of property, frightening our fellow citizens and harming companies already damaged by the crisis,” the mayor said.
Marches were called for cities all over Spain. Most were peaceful, but Pamplona in the central north saw clashes between police and people throwing bottles.
Madrid municipal authorities said 300 national police officers had been called to assist the city police, but a protest of hundreds ended in the Spanish capital without any splintering of troublemakers.
Spain’s left-wing government announced last week before Hasél was detained that it would amend the law to scrap jail sentences for crimes related to freedom of expression. It didn’t specifically mention the rap artist or set a timetable for the changes, and its promise seems to have done little to release the over-boiled social tension.