Spanish police officer sentenced to prison for spreading fake news about migrants

BY| Anadolu Agency 

This is the first conviction of its kind in Spain

A Spanish police officer was sentenced to 15 months in prison on Tuesday for spreading fake news about migrants on social media, according to Spanish daily El Pais.

In 2019, the police officer tweeted a 45-second video showing a brutal attack on a woman, with a man beating and kicking her until she was left unconscious and then lowering his pants.

“Here you have a video of the Moroccan MENA [a slur 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 Morrocans will not be shown in the media,” the police officer wrote in a caption to the video, which was viewed nearly 22,000 times.

But although the video was real, the attack took place in China, not in the Catalan town of Canet de Mar.

According to El Pais, the police officer acknowledged that the tweet was “motivated by his animosity towards and rejection of foreign immigrants from Morocco.”

Spain’s leading daily also confirmed that this is the first time someone in Spain has been convicted for spreading fake news.

In the sentence, the court determined that the man knew he was lying about the context of the video. Furthermore, it found he shared it to “unfairly defame unaccompanied foreign minors” by linking them to violence and sexual assault.

Besides the video that landed him a prison term, he made multiple xenophobic and racist Twitter posts, some with false or misleading information about immigrants.

“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,” said one of his tweets, quoting the former leader of the US Ku Klux Klan.

Barcelona prosecutor Miguel Angel Aguilar is pioneering the prosecution of this type of crime.

In a separate case, he is asking for a two-year prison sentence for a woman who shared a video of a group of children attacking their teacher. Like this case, the accused said the incident happened in Spain while it actually took place in Brazil.

In Spain, young migrants have been one of the main groups targeted by the far right. The party Vox speaks of them often and blames them for violence and attacks in the country.