Spanish supremacist Twitter user gets 15-month jail sentence for racist tweets against immigrants
The man wrote against Moroccans, immigrant children and Muslims from a supremacist account mentioning the Celtic cross, Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and media conspiracies to hide the information.
A Spanish Twitter user, J.J.M.F., has accepted 15 months in jail, a €1,600 fine and a prohibition from undertaking any teaching activities as part of a plea deal with the Barcelona hate-crimes prosecutor, who accused him of a crime against the dignity of others motivated by discrimination after publishing several racist, hate-filled tweets against immigrants, especially immigrant children, Moroccans and Muslims.
One tweet published on the evening of July 1, 2019, that the prosecutor says was retweeted 19 times, with 13 likes, “at least 93 comments” and 21,900 video views, read: “Here you have the video of the young Morrocan in Canet de Mar, those ones we’re going to be giving money to until they’re 23, the kids of Pedrito Piscinas. Also, then he rapes her, you won’t see these possessed demons and these packs of Moroccans in the media”.
The video showed a man “brutally attacking a woman”, with 15 punches and seven kicks to the head, “which left her unconcious” before he tried to remove her trousers and dragged her off by the hair. The video wasn’t recorded in Canet del Mar, Catalonia or even Spain. It was recorded in June 2019 in China. Chinese police had published it to seek people’s help in detaining the offender.
“It has nothing to do with any event that happened in Spain, much less in the town of Canet del Mar”, said the prosecutor’s office. “Fake news is all over the Internet and tends to take advantage of current events or moments, by adding audiovisual material to make the reader believe they are related”.
A spokeswoman for the Prosecutor’s office described the case as “pioneering” and the accusation sent to the court said the man had sought to: “slander young unaccompanied minors from other countries, who come to our country, especially Moroccan children, associating them in a general manner with violent acts and sexual assaults”, thereby “increasing among the population prejudices and sterotypes against this especially vulnerable group, with the associated risk of generating sentiments of rejection and social hostility towards them”.
“The defendant’s account contained multiple publications of a xenophobic, racist nature, that anyone on the Twitter social network could access […] all of them directed towards an identical outright rejection of the presence of foreigners in Spain, especially North-Africans and/or Muslims”.
Other tweets published by the man, referenced only by his initials J.J.M.F., included the following message on July 4, 2019: “These are the sons of bitches who abused a GIRL of 14 but because they’re not SPANISH, you won’t see it on Antena 3, TeleCirco [Tele5] y la Secta [la Sexta]” TV channels.
On July 5, 2019, he wrote: “Fucking MENA [young unaccompanied minors] sons of bitches”, along with a photo, and then several other simliar tweets that summer whose full context is not clear from the version of the prosecutor’s charge document provided to reporters.
Finally, on August 7, 2019, he published a message in the early hours of the morning that read “fucking moors” and then at lunchtime the same day another in which “the Celtic cross, a symbol normally used by people with far-right, national socialist and supremacist ideas, along with the famous phrase spoken by the leader of the white supremacist movement and Ku Klux Klan member David Lane: ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children’“.
El País reported the defendant was a civil guard (police officer) but both the Barcelona prosecutor’s office and the regional high court in Catalonia denied knowledge of his profession.
As is habitual in Spain for a first offence and a jail sentence of less than two-years, the Public Prosecutor has agreed with a petition to suspend the sentence, pending the judge’s ruling, and on the condition the man close and does not open any more social media accounts.
💰 Subscribe now:
🔥 Understand the stories changing Spain better
📝 Access all the articles & 💬 Substack chat with Matthew
💪 Guarantee this independent reporting & analysis