Four Pakistani nationals were arrested in Barcelona earlier this week after they poured concrete on part of a memorial to the victims of the 2017 Barcelona terror attack.
The four men poured concrete over a plaque on the La Rambla street which is a memorial to the victims, 16 of whom died, of the Barcelona radical Islamic terror attack. The vandalism took place at around 6 p.m. in the evening and the suspects were soon caught by police just yards away from the site of the crime, Spanish newspaper El Pais reports.
Police were tipped off by a pedestrian who managed to capture the act on their mobile phone and helped identify the Pakistani men who were behind it.
Each of the four men has been charged with harming the memorial and have also been charged under Spanish hate crime legislation due to the nature of the attack. The concrete has since been removed from the memorial.
The memorial itself contains the phrase “May peace cover you, oh city of peace” in Spanish, Catalan, English, and Arabic and lies next to a drawing of the word Barcelona by artist Frederic Amat, along with the date and time of the terrorist attack.
The incident comes just over a year since Stefan Åkerlund, the father of Stockholm terror attack victim Ebba Åkerlund, complained repeatedly to police that a migrant had vandalised his daughter’s grave on multiple occasions.
“I personally caught him in the act of desecration, when he was pouring [candle wax] on Ebba’s grave; the police released him after only one hour in custody,” Åkerlund said.
“That’s what my nightly visits to the graveyard were worth.”
Since the Barcelona attacks, Spain has been on high alert for radical Islamic terrorist plots. Spanish and Moroccan authorities have managed to foil a potential attack on the city of Seville during Holy Week earlier this year.
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