It was one of the minor incidents of October 2017 in Catalonia - but one of many actions that seemed a flagrant abuse of rights at the time, which have somehow disappeared from view.
On the night of 25th October, 2017, in the central Barcelona neighbourhood of El Born, a group of the Spanish National Police officers sent to Catalonia for the referendum were the protagonists of a bar brawl. Allegedly, the off-duty officers shouted, harassed clients and mistook Italian-speaking staff at the bar for Catalan speakers, demanding to be spoken to in Spanish because "Catalonia is Spain". After bar staff refused to serve them more drinks, they damaged the premises and assaulted waiters.
Whatever happened about that incident? Well, Spain's National Police Corps closed the file against the officers involved in 2018.
The interior ministry, responding to a parliamentary question from EH Bildu member of parliament Jon Iñarritu, confirms that the Spanish police closed their internal investigation in October 2018, months after the investigating court closed the case against the officers, who were accommodated on one of the ships docked at the Barcelona port. The ministry says the agents had no responsibility for the incidents and it was the waiters who attacked them.
The interior ministry claims that the incident was the result of the "disappearance" inside the bar of a cellphone belonging to one of the officers. According to this narrative, when they realized they did not have the phone, they asked for an explanation and one of the waiters struck a police officer, injuring him in "both arms" and "knocking him to the floor". The cellphone, it says, eventually appeared behind the counter under a wooden platform "with no-one knowing how it got there."
This version with the theft of the mobile phone as the start of the incidents is light years away from the one given by the waiters when the events took place. Witnesses to the fight confirmed that the officers, inebriated, were disturbing other clients and harassing the waiters because they weren't speaking Spanish.
As for the phone, the waiters say it ended up there because the police officer also ended up behind the bar demanding to be served more alcohol.
This was not the first time the Basque politician Iñarritu has inquired into the facts of the matter. In 2018, when he was a senator, he had already asked questions about this brawl involving Spanish police officers. At that time, he was told that a file had been opened on the matter, in a response that recounte the story about the mobile phone and mentioned that things were in process.
