Spanish lawyers and police inspectors are under investigation by the Spanish public prosecutor’s office for incitement to hatred against Moroccans and defamation against the mayor of Barcelona. The Maria of Barcelona filed a complaint directly against fake news.
These people, who include members of the Spanish Civil Guard as well as psychologists, are all involved in an operation to spread racist fake news against Moroccans.
The case dates back to mid-March when fake news spread like wildfire on social networks, talking about an apartment supposedly occupied by 1,600 Moroccans in Barcelona and that it would be the town hall would have allowed to live there.
A wave of hatred and racist insults was triggered among the Spanish population following the dissemination of this information. Barcelona City Hall immediately took steps to investigate the matter.
The investigations have so far identified 4 people who are the subject of a formal complaint from the town hall of the Spanish city for spreading fake news and insulting the current acting mayor, Ada Colau.
Barcelona City Hall also accuses them of the crime of incitement to hatred and regretted that the hoax constitutes “an incitement to hatred, resentment and animosity towards the Maghreb community of Morocco because of their origin”, accusing them “directly and massively of having committed a scam that affects all citizens”.
The town hall pointed out that some 93,000 views of this news item were recorded on Twitter accounts identified as representatives of the police.
In the message that has gone viral and which has even been relayed by the Iberian press, the mayor was accused of having allowed 1,600 Moroccans to reside in one and the same apartment in Barcelona in the Horta-Guinardó district in order to allow them to touch social benefits in exchange for votes in the elections.
Furthermore, the widely relayed message claimed that police officers broke into the apartment but only found 5 people, adding that “the remaining 1,595 lived in Morocco but were registered in Barcelona” and that they would have “received all the aid that the town hall grants” and that they could also “vote by mail in the next municipal elections”.
The authors of this message insisted that the example of this apartment would not be “just one among many”.