Patricia Heras kills herself after being sentenced for a crime she did not commit (Catalunya)

Background: Barcelona / February 4 2006: There was a fight with the police outside a massive party in a squatted building (not run by people from the movement though) where some 1500 people were attending. In the confused events that followed a cop was hit by a potted plant thrown from a balcony causing him severe injuries that left him paraplegic. Importantly, the original police report that attributed the injuries of the cop to a potted plant has mysteriously vanished. The arrested and hunted of that moment were randomly taken from among passers-by; people leaving from the party, even a couple of young guys who happened to have the bad luck of having a motorbike accident driving through the area.. a well known and classic tale of police revenge… they were brutality beaten and fitted up.

The municipal police, instead of investigating properly, decided to blame this on the entire squatter movement- in conjunction with the municipal authorities and the media they intensified an existing campaign of media smears and violent repression. The story spouted by the authorities changed several times to fit the ‘facts’ as it suited them, the disgusting mayor of the city at the time self-importantly pontificating with lies. First they decided that the building in question was “related” somehow to the squatter movement, something everyone knows in the movement is false, then they changed the story of the potted plant for a stone, finally they accused this girl, Patricia Heras, of throwing not the stone but a mobile fence in the course of the confusing struggle.

She always denied it. She denied being there at all, she claimed to be a politically motivated scapegoat. She also denounced, like most others arrested in this confusing episode of likely political revenge, her torture while in detention.

She was sentenced to three years of prison. Being a free spirit, she could not put up with it and she killed herself before going to jail again.

There are many ways to kill:
they can stab you,
they can take your bread,
they can not cure your illness,
they can push you to suicide…
Bertolt Brecht

http://325.nostate.net/?p=2342#more-2342

Open letter from Mariana, mother of Rodrigo Lanza, one of the original defendants.

http://sareantifaxista.blogspot.com/2011/04/carta-abierta-de-mariana-madre-de.html

http://catalansolidarity.blogspot.com/2007/04/free-february-4th-prisoners.html