Spain arrests eight after far-right groups and migrants clash
TORRE PACHECO
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 laborers 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.
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