Catalonia detains 130 after Barcelona riots, seeks to jail 6 minors

Catalonia's regional government said Saturday's riots in Barcelona were straightforward crime, as prosecutors sought the internment of 6 minors and sought to ban more than 20 others from attending protests. Mossos d'Esquadra, the Catalan police, have detained 130 people over the unrest in and around Placa de Catalunya, most of them minors, officials said.

ElDiario.es put the number of minors detained at 74, while La Razon reported 76; most of the adults detained, 54 in total, have been identified, and 49 of them had been brought before a judge by Monday, La Razon reported. About fifteen police officers were injured during Saturday's unrest, Catalan broadcaster RTVE reported. Only six of those held were women, and just two had previous criminal records, according to ElDiario.es.

The unrest followed a call to protest issued anonymously through about twenty TikTok accounts under the banner 'Blocus', the same name used behind recent riots in Paris and inspired by France's 'Lycees Indignes' student movement, ABC reported. What was presented as a protest for public education turned into looting of electronics, jewellery and clothing shops, with dozens of customers locked inside a department store for hours, and some stolen goods later put up for sale on secondhand websites, ABC said.

Catalan police had deployed more than 500 officers for the expected protest but did not anticipate its scale, as up to 600 people gathered in the city centre, according to ABC. Mossos are seeking judicial authorisation to trace the social media accounts behind the call, and police have opened 68 administrative cases after seizing knives, pepper spray and fireworks, ElDiario.es reported.

Catalonia's interior minister, Nuria Parlon, said her department would ask courts to shut down messaging groups used to spread the call to riot, and urged WhatsApp and Telegram to close accounts she said were inciting young people to break the law. She said new calls had already been detected for next Saturday, 31 October, and that they would not be tolerated.

Barcelona mayor Jaume Collboni met shopkeepers and restaurant owners on Sunday to assess the damage and discuss possible compensation, and defended the police response, RTVE reported. Spain's foreign minister, Jose Manuel Albares, said there was no evidence so far that the call to protest was part of a foreign hybrid attack, though he noted Europe had seen election interference in recent years.