The police siege against the Blocus agitators continues. The Mossos d'Esquadra have arrested two underage girls, aged 14 and 17, for promoting the looting that took place on October 24th in Barcelona. In total, in Catalonia there have already been five arrests, plus the detainee from Valencia who proclaimed himself the leader of Blocus and incited the looting in Barcelona. In fact, this Monday it was also learned that the alleged agitator arrested in Cabrera d'Anoia, a 21-year-old man, has been sent to provisional prison. Right now, three defendants are in prison, one minor is in a detention center, and one final minor is at liberty.

A phenomenon without a shared cause, without identifiable leaders, and with a logic of propagation that is difficult to decipher. Blocus still presents many questions. ARA proposes five keys to try to understand how it spreads, who might be behind it, and what drives young people (many of them minors) to join it.

The Blocus threat has paralyzed the center of Barcelona without riots occurring like those of last Saturday. Although there were calls in different Catalan cities, the one in the capital was the one the police took most seriously because it had up to three different locations. Ultimately, however, it came to nothing. The Mossos d'Esquadra identified some groups of young people dressed in black who were not carrying ID cards – a fact that would indicate they wanted to avoid being identified – but who were carrying objects such as balaclavas, pyrotechnics and, in some cases, objects to break windows. In about fifteen of these cases, they took the minors to police stations and spoke with their parents or guardians so that they would come to get them. Most likely, police sources indicate, they will be reported for making preparations for the riots.

It says a lot about how new a social movement is that it currently cannot be classified. Not even that it can be called a movement, nor that it is social. The Mossos d'Esquadra speak of Blocus as a phenomenon. They discovered it at the beginning of last week, shortly before riots that exceeded their expectations of violence. Since Saturday, they have been analyzing them in depth: the profile of those arrested, the users inciting these groups, the accounts calling for new protests... And in the last few hours they have carried out arrests in record time. For the moment, the police have not identified any clear pattern.

"I am not in Spain nor in Europe," said the main administrator of a Telegram group with 1,500 people enigmatically this week in a video, calling for a new Blocus-style demonstration in Barcelona today. He called himself Fuck A.E.A.T (in reference to the Tax Agency) and tried to recruit young people to attend the protest. "On Thursday we will create a filtered group for those who really want to come," he warned on Monday on the channel. The reality is that a few hours later they closed this group (and three more that followed) and it was proven that the supposed creator of Fuck A.E.A.T was indeed in Spain, specifically in Picanya (Valencia). This Friday, Civil Guard agents arrested him for preparing new riots and for being related to those of last Saturday in Barcelona. The hours go by and there are more and more detainees for the Blocus movement. The trickle does not stop: first it was the young people who caused the riots; now it is the turn of those who incited them.

The Mossos d'Esquadra arrested a 16-year-old minor this Thursday afternoon in Bellmunt d'Urgell as one of the Blocus agitators. The police arrested him as the alleged perpetrator of the crimes of conspiracy to commit public disorder and incitement to commit damage and looting in the city of Lleida, in a call on social media for Saturday. According to police sources, investigators from the General Information Commissariat located him during inspection tasks of communication channels on instant messaging applications, created at the beginning of the week under the name "Blocus Lleida". This minor was the creator and administrator of these groups.

It was a scene straight out of a mob movie. A man entered the Joan XXIII Hospital in Tarragona this Thursday morning hiding his face, went up to a room, and shot a patient to death in front of his wife. Just like the attempted assassination of Vito Corleone while he was admitted to a medical center.

"It didn't take us by surprise, the facts deny it." With these words, the Director General of Police, Ferran López, has denied that the Mossos d'Esquadra did not expect the riots on Saturday in Barcelona. The demonstration had a level 2 out of 3 rating and, as this newspaper has already been explaining, they carried out 300 checks on young people before the gathering and also confiscated hammers, pyrotechnics, sprays, stones, and balaclavas. There had already been some 'Blocus'-style demonstrations before, one in Manresa, for example, without incidents. But the police were indeed surprised by the violence of the young people. "We did not correctly gauge the level of violence, we had never seen it before," admitted López before an opposition that criticized the Mossos for not sufficiently anticipating this scenario, to the point that Junts has requested the resignation of Minister Parlon.

The Mossos d'Esquadra are investigating the homicide of a woman in the Nou Barris district of Barcelona. A man turned himself in this Wednesday to the Municipal Police of Madrid as the alleged perpetrator of this crime. According to sources consulted by ARA, the victim and the detained man were a couple. As reported by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia, there are no prior judicial records between the two.

A train driver strike the day after the tragic train accident in Toledo foreshadowed a complicated day for mobility in Catalonia, but the reality is that no major incidents have been recorded. In part, however, this has also been because there have been fewer passengers: the Rodalies network recorded a 25% drop in passenger numbers compared to a normal day in the early hours of this Thursday. In contrast, coaches leaving the Vallès Oriental and Occidental and the Maresme regions filled all their seats and some delays occurred. On the roads, according to the Catalan Traffic Service, no significant increase in mobility has been detected either. The company Ouigo has cancelled all the trains it had scheduled for this Friday and next Monday with the aim of preventing the strike from increasing chaos in the railway system due to the Urda accident.

How to stop the domino effect of Telegram channels and social media accounts calling for new riots of the Blocus style, as seen on Saturday in Barcelona, is currently one of the main concerns of the Mossos d'Esquadra. Doing so by requesting a court order is a process that can be slow, and platforms often have slow rhythms as well. For this reason, as ARA has learned, the Catalan police have requested help from CITCO, the Intelligence Center against Terrorism and Organized Crime, which depends on the Ministry of the Interior.

"We only talked about that with friends. About Paris. About the videos appearing on TikTok. I wanted to protest," he says, now free. The phone rang at two in the morning. It was the Mossos d'Esquadra and they had arrested the boy. The next morning they went to the City of Justice and entered a room full of relatives who, like them, were surprised, stressed, worried. Fathers crying. Mothers denying that their son was capable of doing all that. They reunited with him. All the children were minors and all had been arrested for the disturbances that were recorded this Saturday night in Barcelona. "It was chaos. There were only two lawyers for all the children," the relatives comment.

Did they expect it? The answer is yes. The Mossos d'Esquadra were expecting protests this Saturday in Barcelona. They had been monitoring social media for days and had detected calls to emulate the riots in Paris. They knew there were Telegram groups with 700 youths. Since 4 p.m., more than 300 youths were identified and hammers and other metal tools were seized that they intended to use to loot businesses. But were they surprised? Very much so. Initially, about 300 people were expected, and there were more than 500.

A case of horse abuse was solved as if it were a crime. At the enclosure where it was attacked, the Mossos d'Esquadra found a tool stained with blood, and this was the key to solving the case. The horse belonged to a very specific breed and had its genetic profile officially registered in a database. By comparing this information, the police were able to confirm that the animal's DNA matched the one found on the tool. That had been the weapon with which it was abused. This is an example of the investigations that the Environment division of the Mossos has to face more frequently.

"A website from the jihadist environment affiliated with Daesh has been detected where a call is made to attack both the police and protesters in the protests taking place in various European countries. The publication specifically mentions Spain". This is one of the most prominent points of an internal alert, to which ARA has had access, which has been issued by the Ministry of the Interior and which the main State security forces have received.

"We cannot wait for more things to happen to take action." With these words, the chief commissioner of the Mossos d'Esquadra, Sílvia Catà, summarizes what is happening with youth gangs in Catalonia: they are smaller groups than in the 2000s, much more heterogeneous and flexible, with less presence than back then, but they exist. And, for the first time, the Catalan police are providing figures on the phenomenon. According to the Mossos d'Esquadra's calculations, there are a thousand young people in the orbit of these gangs and approximately half can be directly classified as members. This data is the result of months of research, with more than 600 diverse sources consulted, ranging from a police report of an incident to an informant. All of this has led the Mossos to create the Proa, a specific plan to fight against youth gangs. This Thursday it was presented within the force and it will be launched in November.

The Mossos d'Esquadra have arrested two boys aged 19 and 20 as the alleged perpetrators of the robberies against minors that had put the Sarrià-Sant Gervasi district on alert in recent days. The alarm was mainly raised after they held up and assaulted a group of teenagers in the early hours of October 10th at the intersection of Bertrand i Serra and Torras i Pujalt streets with a fake gun. According to police sources, the youths explained that the assailants stole various personal items from them, including mobile phones, clothing, and footwear.

Ahmed's suspicion is that someone searched for two fairly common Arab names on social media and they, unfortunately, were the ones chosen. "They wrote the name of a racialized person and I came up," he narrates. And Youssef's suspicion is that the day before he posted a video on TikTok that went quite viral and they took his photo from there. The result is a post with his image accompanied by two names that are not his own to accuse them of being murderers.

"Prepare our country for the worst while we are still in time to prevent the worst from becoming a catastrophe." This is the cry of nearly 700 people, including scientists, science communicators, researchers, civil society, and public figures in an open letter addressed to the Government—and to the Generalitat Valenciana—in which they request action before El Niño arrives, a climate phenomenon originating in the Pacific Ocean that is characterized by a large release of thermal energy into the atmosphere and which can lead to practically unprecedented downpours. Researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) Jordi Solé and UPC professor and Doctor of Physics Olga Alcaraz warned this Tuesday that El Niño will create another layer of heat in a Mediterranean that, as we have seen in recent weeks with exceptional rainfall, is already extremely hot.

Catalonia is spending another night looking at the sky. The DANA DANA,which is sweeping through a good part of the Mediterranean and has left downpours and severe flooding this Monday at dawn in the Valencian Community, has also watered the Principality with storms that have been locally intense and that may last until early Tuesday morning. According to Civil Protection, the day has left significant records, such as 67 liters per square meter in Falset, but the situation experienced this Monday cannot be compared to that lived in Valencia and Alicante or two weeks ago in Catalonia, especially in the Vallès Oriental and Occidental and the Maresme. For the moment, the harshest episode of this cold drop has avoided Catalonia.