Spain arrests more than 40 as riots spread across country over jailed rapper in free speech row

Protest against the arrest of Catalan rapper Pablo Hasel in Barcelona

Credit: REUTERS/Nacho Doce

More than 40 people were arrested and dozens injured during the second night of unauthorised demonstrations across Spain over the jailing of a rapper.

Radical Left-wing rapper and activist Pablo Hasel was seized by police on Tuesday morning from a university building in Lleida for criminally offensive song lyrics and Twitter posts.

A group of supporters had barricaded themselves inside the building after the 32-year-old ignored an order to enter prison.

Protests against the rapper’s detention first flared up in Barcelona and other cities in Catalonia and Valencia on Tuesday, with demonstrators setting refuse containers alight and riot police shooting rubber bullets to disperse the crowds.

A woman in Barcelona was reported to have lost an eye after being hit by a police foam round.

On Wednesday night the protests spread to Madrid, with demonstrators and riot police fighting a pitched battle in the capital’s Puerta del Sol square, leading to 55 people being injured, mostly police officers.

Hasel’s rap and writing reflect his extreme Left-wing views, including a series of tweets from between 2014 and 2016 examined by the National Court in which he expressed admiration for members of GRAPO, a Spanish communist terrorist organisation active in the 1970s.

He has justified the use of violence in Spain’s past, and accuses the country’s police forces of torturing and killing prisoners such as Isabel Aparicio, a GRAPO member convicted as an accomplice to murder.

Criticising Saudi Arabian leaders’ involvement in the war in Yemen, Hasel said that “the friends of the Kingdom of Spain are bombarding hospitals while [former Spanish king] Juan Carlos is off whoring with them”.

Hasel has also expressed support for Catalan independence.

The jailing of Hasel, whose real name is Pablo Rivadulla, has become a lightning rod for tension within Spain’s Left-wing government.

Pablo Iglesias, leader of the hard-Left Podemos, has said Hasel should not be jailed, and his party has delivered a request to the Justice Ministry for the rapper to be pardoned.

But Carmen Calvo, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s number two, said that Hasel’s imprisonment was correct under existing laws.

Ms Calvo also warned against “encouraging violence” in reference to the blanket support offered to protestors by Podemos’s parliamentary spokesman, Pablo Echenique. He tweeted images of police using their batons against demonstrators and said: “My wholehearted support for the young antifascists who are demanding justice and freedom of expression in the streets.”

Hasel has been convicted of crimes on four occasions, twice for speech crimes and twice for violent behaviour, the latter he claims were “trumped up” by the police.

He was finally jailed after losing his last appeal against a two-year sentence for insulting the monarchy and glorifying terrorism, although the Supreme Court cut the term to nine months.

Hasel is likely to spend longer in jail, however, as he is refusing to pay a fine and he had already received another two-year sentence for similar offences that was suspended.