Hate crimes in Spain increase in 2021 2:07
(CNN Spanish) -
Agents of the National Police from the central district police station in Madrid are investigating an alleged homophobic group aggression that took place this Sunday in the Spanish capital.
According to a police source familiar with the case, the attack occurred on the afternoon of that day when the victim, a 20-year-old homosexual, was returning to his home in the central Malasaña neighborhood.
The young man told police that upon entering the building, a group of eight people covered by the hoods of the sweatshirts they were wearing rushed in behind him and cornered him.
In the portal, the attackers threatened and insulted the young man for his sexual condition, and even used a knife to engrave one of his homophobic insults on his buttocks.
Only at night, after going through the hospital and encouraged by his partner, the attacked young man went to the police station to report the events.
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From that moment, the police source tells CNN, the police who treated the young man began to treat this case as an alleged hate crime, and began work to gather more information from witnesses and security cameras that are in the area to find the aggressors.
So far there are no detainees, clarifies the same source, but the agents working on the case already have some firm clues that would allow them to make arrests shortly.
These events have had a great impact in Spain both in social networks and among political leaders.
For example, Pedro Sánchez, president of the Spanish Government, on Monday condemned the aggression through his official Twitter account with a message in which he declared his "affection for the attacked young man" and assured that the Executive will continue to work "for an open country and diverse, where no one is afraid to be who they are, where we all live free and safe ”.
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Furthermore, as Isabel Rodríguez, spokesperson for the Spanish Executive, announced on Tuesday, Sánchez has urgently summoned for this Friday the monitoring commission of the Plan to Fight Hate Crimes in order to “analyze the situation and, in its In this case, activate new mechanisms to avoid this type of event ”.
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This event takes place two months after the brutal aggression that ended the life of Samuel Luiz, in A Coruña, and which also generated a great wave of indignation in the country.
Although the motive for the homicide has not yet been clarified, friends of the 24-year-old say that the trigger was his sexual orientation, something that the investigators do not affirm or rule out pending the conclusion of the investigation.
The sensation, as organizations representing the LGBTQ community recently reported to CNN, is that the violence with which these attacks against sexual diversity are perpetrated is increasing.
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Based on the latest data provided by the Ministry of the Interior this past July, 610 complaints of hate crimes were registered in the first half of 2021, 9.3% more than in the same period in 2019. Without having provided Disaggregated figures, the authorities indicated that the majority of these 610 records corresponded to crimes for racism and xenophobia, for ideology and against sexual orientation.
In order to show its strongest condemnation of these events and other cases of attacks against sexual diversity made public throughout 2021, several organizations representing the LGBTQ collective have called protests in Madrid for this Wednesday and Saturday afternoon.
These concentrations, as indicated by the organizations in the so-called shares through social networks, are scheduled to take place at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid.
Homophobia