Absolution. A Barcelona judge exonerated the worker of the Stop Okupas Low Cost company, who was also on the citizen lists in the 2023 municipal elections in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, accused of injury and minor threats against one of the occupants of the property. -sec which denounces the real estate harassment of the illegal eviction company. The judgment, to which elDiario.es had access, reduces the “struggle” between the employee and one of the residents of the property to a “consensual conflict”.
“If anything happens to my employee, I’m going to blow you all up, burn you and kill you all,” the defendant can be heard saying in the video seen during the trial. “I gave you a ‘yuyu’ and you’re going to die,” he adds before throwing himself at the complainant who was recording the scene.
The prosecution requested that the accused be fined 180 euros and compensation of 340 euros for a minor offense of injury, a request that the neighbor’s private prosecutor’s office increased to a fine of 2,160 euros and compensation of 470 euros adding the crime of threats.
The acquittal is the first of the trials of the occupants of a property in Poble-sec against real estate harassment. Another court in Barcelona is investigating the company that owns the property and Stop Okupas for various acts of harassment of the occupants, such as sabotaging the property’s water, electricity and downspout installations.
The judge reduces the credibility of the video which was at the heart of the accusations. “In the images, no direct aggression from the accused towards the complainant is observed,” concludes judge Eugenia Canal. A witness claims to have seen the accused hit the complainant, but the sentence gives more value to the testimony of the police officer who saw “a struggle”.
The sentence concludes that in reality what the Stop Okupas security guard wanted to do was take the cell phone of the occupant of the property, not hit him. “There was indeed a consensual dispute between the two,” underlines the judge, who excludes that the Stop Okupas employee acted with the intention of harming the complainant.
Concerning the threats made by the accused, the magistrate reduced them to an “exchange of words between the two parties”. The sentence places the guard’s comments in a “context of tension and verbal violence on both sides” and excludes the possibility that they caused “fear in the complainant”.
