By Leonardo Benassatto
TORRE PACHECO, Spain (Reuters) -Spanish police have arrested eight people after three nights of clashes between far-right groups and North African migrants in a town in southeastern Spain, the government said on Monday.
In one of Spain’s worst such flare-ups of recent times, several dozen youths, some hooded, hurled glass bottles and other objects at riot police in Torre Pacheco on Sunday night, Reuters journalists saw.
Police fired rubber bullets to quell the unrest.
The trouble stemmed from an attack last week on a man in his late 60s that left him injured and recovering at home.
The victim told LaSexta broadcaster last week that he had been on a walk in a cemetery garden when two men, speaking in a language he did not understand, ran towards him, one in an agitated state.
“He threw me to the ground and hit me. It all happened very quickly. I think they hit me and then left,” said the man, whom LaSexta and other media identified as Domingo Tomas.
Authorities said they arrested two foreigners suspected of being involved in the assault though they were still looking for the main perpetrator, who had been identified.
The other six – five Spaniards and one person of North African origin – were arrested for assault, public disorder, hate crimes or damage to property, the Interior Ministry said.
Migrants, many of them second-generation, make up about a third of Torre Pacheco’s population of about 40,000.
The area around the town also hosts large numbers of migrants who work as day labourers in agriculture, one of the pillars of the economy in the Murcia region.
“I ask the migrant community not to leave their homes and not to confront rioters, because confrontation achieves nothing and ultimately makes us all afraid,” local mayor Pedro Angel Roca told national broadcaster TVE.
‘WE WANT PEACE’
Speaking to radio station Cadena Ser, Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska attributed the violence to anti-immigration rhetoric from far-right groups and political parties such as Vox, which he said unjustifiably links immigration to crime.
The violence in Torre Pacheco was organised and fomented by calls on social media, the minister added.
Vox leader Santiago Abascal denied any responsibility for the incidents and said the goverment’s migration policies were to blame.
Spain has been open to migration and its economic benefits, even as other European governments have tightened borders. But debate has reignited, led by Vox, as plans to relocate unaccompanied underage migrants from the Canary Islands to the rest of Spain have been confirmed in recent weeks.
“Spain is not a country that hunts down immigrants, and if we have to take to the streets, it is to defend the rights of thousands of people who are completely trapped and distressed by this hunt for immigrants,” Migration Minister Elma Saiz told El Pais newspaper.
Abdelali, a North African migrant who lives in Torre Pacheco and declined to give his surname, said he was afraid of riding his scooter for fear of being hit by bottles from rioters.
“We want peace. That’s what we want, we don’t want anything else,” he told Reuters on Sunday.
In 2000, violent anti-immigration protests broke out in the Almeria town of El Ejido in southern Spain after three Spanish citizens were killed by Moroccan migrants.
(Reporting by Violeta Sanchez Moura and Leonardo Benassatto; Additional reporting and writing by Emma Pinedo; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)
