More than a year in prison for publishing a false video against migrant minors in Spain

Now the court must decide in its sentence whether to prevent the accused from entering prison, which is usually common in sentences of less than two years, provided that he does not commit a crime again, keep all his discriminatory profiles on Twitter closed and do not open any new ones.

The events date back to July 2019, when the defendant, who had multiple racist and xenophobic messages on his social network account, according to the Prosecutor’s Office, published a tweet with a 45-second video where a man was seen brutally assaulting a a woman to the point of rendering her unconscious and attempting to remove her clothing.

In the text that accompanied it, the accused stated: “Here you have the Moroccan MENA from Canet de Mar, to those of whom we are going to give the payment (social assistance) until they are 23 years old”, assuring that the alleged aggressor also raped the victim and that this information did not appear in the media.

MENA is the acronym for “Unaccompanied Foreign Minor”, used to refer to minor immigrants who arrive in Spain alone.

But the video -which was viewed 21,900 times- did not correspond to any aggression that occurred in this town on the Catalan coast, but to events recorded in China and that had nothing to do with Canet de Mar.

“With the dissemination of the aforementioned text and the shocking video, the defendant intended, with manifest contempt for the truth and in a massive and indiscriminate manner among all potential users of the social network Twitter, to associate the content of the video with an alleged violation that occurred in the locality of Canet de Mar”, considered the Prosecutor’s Office.

“All this in order to globally and unfairly defame unaccompanied minors from other countries,” he added about this group of “especially vulnerable” young people.