The Civil Guard officer J.J.M.F. posted a video on Twitter in July 2019 showing a man violently assaulting a woman. He accompanied the video with a message stating, “Here you have the video of the Moroccan MENA from Canet de Mar, to whom we are going to give benefits until they turn 23, the kids of Pedrito Piscinas. By the way, then he rapes her, these savages and these Moroccan gangs will not appear in the media.” However, the video, which had 21,900 views, actually depicted an assault that occurred in China and was released by Chinese authorities seeking public assistance to locate the perpetrator. In November 2022, the Provincial Court of Barcelona sentenced the officer to 15 months in prison for spreading fake news about unaccompanied foreign minors (MENAs), leading Defense Minister Margarita Robles to expel him from the Civil Guard. The Military Chamber of the Supreme Court has now upheld that decision.
The punishment imposed on the officer, separation from service, is the most severe under the law that regulates the disciplinary regime of the Civil Guard. It is reserved for agents guilty of very serious offenses, including those convicted of intentional crimes. The officer appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, but the judges rejected his arguments, stating in their ruling that the sanction was appropriate considering that his conduct was “radically incompatible with the image of probity, decorum, and honesty that every member of the Civil Guard must demonstrate.”
The criminal sentence that led to the disciplinary sanction found the officer guilty of a crime against the dignity of individuals for discriminatory reasons and imposed a 15-month prison term, a fine of 1,620 euros, and confiscation of all his social media profiles for two years. According to the proven facts presented by the Barcelona Court, the officer acted out of “animosity and rejection towards foreign immigrants of Moroccan origin, and among them their most vulnerable sector, unaccompanied minors.” The video he shared, falsely claiming it had taken place in Canet de Mar, showed a man brutally assaulting a woman, delivering 15 punches to her head followed by 7 kicks also to the head, rendering her unconscious. The assailant then attempted to remove her pants, eventually dragging her away by the hair until they disappeared from the camera’s view.
The judges noted that the recording was made on June 22, 2019, and had “nothing to do with any event in Spain, much less in the town of Canet de Mar.” It was, they warned, a fake news story. “By spreading the said text and the shocking video, the accused intended, with blatant disregard for the truth and among all potential users of the Twitter social network, to associate the video content with an alleged rape that occurred in the town of Canet de Mar (…) in order to globally and unfairly defame unaccompanied minors from other countries coming to our country, particularly Moroccan children, associating them in a generalized way with violent acts and sexual assaults,” the Court pointed out.
The tribunal also highlighted the officer’s Twitter profile, which featured “multiple publications of xenophobic and racist nature” with “deformed and/or false information about immigrants in general, all of them marked by the same frontal rejection of the presence of foreigners in Spain, especially if they are Maghrebis and/or Muslims, and which, by their publication and massive dissemination, he knew generated or could generate feelings of rejection, phobia, and abhorrence among the population towards them.”
