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ARCHIVED - Racist police officer becomes first person in Spain to be convicted of spreading fake news
The Guardia Civil officer has been jailed for spreading false news about migrants on social media
A Guardia Civil officer has been sentenced to 15 months in prison for spreading fake news about Moroccan migrants on social media – the first conviction of its kind in Spain.
The defendant published a 45-second video showing a violent attack on a woman, with a man kicking and punching her until she is unconscious. He then grabs her by the hair, drags her across the floor and tries to pull down her pants before the clip ends.
Alongside the video, which was tweeted in 2019 and viewed almost 22,000 times, the officer wrote: "Here you have a video of the Moroccan MENA (a derogatory name for underage migrants) in Canet de Mar. These are the kind of people that we are paying until they are 23 years old … to make matters worse, the rape, these delinquents, and herds of Moroccans will not be shown in the media."
However, the attack actually took place in China, not Barcelona.
In a Barcelona court on Tuesday November 8, the defendant accepted that the tweet was "motivated by his animosity towards and rejection of foreign immigrants from Morocco".
According to the prosecutor's statement, the accused also acknowledged that his Twitter profile "contained multiple publications of a xenophobic and racist nature, searchable by anyone on Twitter, with supposedly distorted information about immigrants in general, all of them presided over by an identical frontal rejection of the presence of foreigners in Spain".
The court found that the police officer was well aware that he was lying about the content and context of the video clip and determined that he shared it to "unfairly defame unaccompanied foreign minors" by linking them to violence and sexual assault.
Image: Archive
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