Its purpose was to accuse an immigrant of violence
A member of the Spanish national guard who posted a video on Twitter with false content with the intention of charging an immigrant with violencewas sentenced today to 15 months in prison in one of the first cases of spreading fake news examined by the Spanish judiciary.
The accused and the prosecution, which had initially asked for two years in prison, reached an agreement shortly before the start of the trial in Barcelona to impose a prison sentence of 15 months and a fine of 1,620 euros, announced a Barcelona court where the case was heard.
As the sentence is less than two years and it is the first conviction for the accused, a settlement will likely be made to avoid prison time for a member of the National Guard.
As soon as the decision was announced, the National Guard initiated disciplinary proceedings against its member, according to sources within this military force, Spain’s equivalent of the gendarmerie.
The defendant, who had already posted several posts with racist and xenophobic content, according to the prosecution, posted a video on Twitter in 2019 in which a man appeared to attack a woman by punching and kicking her until she passed out.
He had accompanied the video with a text that said in Spanish: “Here you see a Moroccan unaccompanied minor migrant in Canet de Mar”, a town in Catalonia, as “those we will give money until they turn 23”. The national guard himself claimed that the perpetrator had raped the victim and that the media had not reported the “news”.
The video, which gathered 21,900 views, did not correspond to an attack that took place in this Catalan city, but in China.
“By disseminating the said text and the shocking video, the defendant sought, in flagrant disregard for the truth and in a massive and indiscriminate manner among all potential users of the social networking site Twitter, to associate the content of the video with an alleged rape that occurred in the town of Canet de Mar,” the prosecutor said.
“All this with the aim of massively and unfairly defaming unaccompanied minors from other countries”, added the prosecutor referring to this category of “particularly vulnerable” young people.
The Twitter account where the accused posted the video has since been closed.
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I am currently a news writer for News Bulletin247 where I mostly cover sports news. I have always been interested in writing and it is something I am very passionate about. In my spare time, I enjoy reading and spending time with my family and friends.
