Four people were arrested on Tuesday, May 23 in Spain as part of the investigation into the hanging at the end of January of a model bearing the image of Real Madrid striker Vinicius Junior, police announced.
These arrests come two days after new racist insults uttered against the Brazilian star during a match in the Spanish football championship, which sparked a wave of indignation in the country and abroad.
These four people, arrested in the Spanish capital, are accused of a “hate crime”, a criminal category including racist crimes in Spain, the Spanish police said in a press release. Three of them are “active members of an ultra group of supporters of a Madrid club”, added the police without identifying this club.
The model wearing a Vinicius Junior jersey was found hanged on January 26, the day Real Madrid won 3-1 against Atlético Madrid in the Copa del Rey quarter-finals, under a banner bearing the inscription “Madrid hates Real”. After this incident, Real Madrid had denounced a “malicious and repugnant racist and xenophobic act” against its 22-year-old player, a regular target of racist insults, saying in a press release that it hoped that those “responsible” would be ” punished”. An investigation was immediately opened.
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The investigations, based in particular on testimonies, made it possible to establish that these four supporters, “identified during matches classified as high risk” within the framework of “preventive measures for violence in sport”, were the “presumed perpetrators of the hanging of this model, underlines the police.