A judge in Santa Coloma de Gramenet has opened an investigation following a complaint from social entities in the city against Vox councilman Aitor Navarro for his racist messages on social media and for having disclosed the names of people receiving municipal social aid or subsidies. The judge has summoned Navarro to testify on November 17 and will also take statements from several witnesses a week later, according to a court order reported by Eldiario.es and consulted by ARA.

Jonathan Andic's defense has sent a list of names they want to testify in the judicial case to the Martorell courts, which are investigating him as the alleged perpetrator of his father's death. Among them, the name of the lawyer and former politician Miquel Roca Junyent stands out, as reported by El Periódico and confirmed by ARA.

In recent days, prisons have experienced a series of serious incidents. Last week, an inmate from Mas d'Enric convicted of murder escaped during a scheduled outing in Tarragona. A prisoner at Quatre Camins killed his cellmate and another inmate at the same prison died by suicide. His death is the seventh by suicide in Catalan prisons this year, one more than in the whole of last year. All this at a time when the prison population is on the rise and the centers are approaching their capacity limit.

The prisoner who committed suicide this weekend in a cell at Quatre Camins had been living in the intake module for months, separated from the rest. According to what ARA has learned, he was living in isolation as a measure to protect him from other inmates from whom he had received death threats. He had been in this situation since June, and although this measure allowed him to leave his cell for two hours a day, he had not left for about a month.

Nine people face sentences of up to 27 and a half years in prison, accused of attempted murder for setting fire to a Barcelona City Police van with an officer inside, who was able to escape in time through the passenger door. It happened on February 27, 2021, during the protests over the imprisonment of rapper Pablo Hasél, who had entered prison on the 16th of the same month for a conviction for glorifying terrorism and insulting the Crown.

With prisons reaching their capacity limit, one of the ways the administration is trying to gain space is by promoting semi-liberty. As ARA already explained, the general directive to prison workers is to trend toward openness, which the Government had already defended in the previous legislature to improve reintegration and which now also takes on a logistical meaning. While professionals and academics agree that semi-liberties improve the prospects of a prisoner not reoffending, the acceleration of third-degree statuses in recent months leaves some concerns among workers, who warn that in some cases they do not have enough time to treat the inmates. "Excarcerations are being done a bit ahead of time and we don't have time to treat them," summarizes a prison psychologist in conversation with ARA.

More updates on the Andic case. One of the elements under investigation by the Mossos d'Esquadra is the lightning trip to Ecuador made by Jonathan Andic, who is under investigation for the death of his father and founder of Mango, Isak Andic. In this South American country, Jonathan Andic claims that his mobile phone was stolen, the same device he was carrying the day his progenitor died. The Catalan police, however, suspected that the firstborn of the Andics got rid of the phone during this trip. Now, a witness has supported the version put forward by the defense: that his mobile phone was stolen in Quito. As reported by El Nacional and confirmed by ARA, it is a man who acted as his driver and who explained to the Mossos investigators that Andic told him that his mobile had been stolen and that he even accompanied him to buy a new one.

The defense for Jonathan Andic, son of the founder of Mango, denied this Friday that he was interested in therapies that simulated falling on a mountain or into a ravine. This Friday, La Vanguardia published that the eldest son of the Andics, under investigation for the death of his father, founder of Mango, had been interested in a method used by the therapist treating him, J.L., which consisted of simulating a family member's fall into a ravine as a way to establish trust between the two conflicted people.

One of the headlines left this Thursday by the Roger Español case trial has to do with the interpreters who were in the courtroom, unable to translate the lawyers' questions from Catalan to Spanish. The lawyers for the private and popular accusations, exercised by Irídia, Òmnium and the ANC, ended up self-translating or questioning the police directly in Spanish after up to two interpreters could not do their job, a fact that the entities have denounced for "violation of linguistic rights". But how could this situation have occurred?

An inmate at Quatre Camins killed his cellmate tonight in the disciplinary module. At around 11:30 p.m., an inmate in the neighboring cell used the intercom in the room to warn the officers that he heard the noise of a fight, as ARA has learned. The workers knocked on the cell door and the aggressor told them to enter. When they entered, they found him sitting with the other inmate on the floor covered in blood. The victim reportedly died of asphyxiation after being beaten.

The commanders and police officers testifying at the trial for the loss of an eye of Roger Español on 1-O have shielded the actions of the four national police officers sitting in the dock, the only ones who will face trial for the charges from nine years ago. The colleagues of the accused have insisted on the "violence" and "aggressiveness" of the protesters with statements that in many points were identical to one another, and which the court did not allow to be contrasted at the time with the videos of that day. On the second day of the trial, a superior of the riot police also downplayed the possibility that the shotgunner fired directly at the body, with the weapon parallel to the ground, and asserted that the operation was similar to other actions: "It did not differ at all from a Champions League or Copa Libertadores final, a visit from the Pope, or going to help with the DANA or any other catastrophe".

Nine years after the police charges of October 1st, Roger Español explained before a court how and when a rubber bullet emptied his eye. His testimony opened the trial of the only four police officers who will be judged for the October 1st charges. A shotgunner and three commanders face 13 years in prison for an operation that the head of the riot police described as "absolutely perfect," while several witnesses have explained that the agents were shooting directly at people's bodies, not at the ground for the rubber balls to bounce. Español believes the shot was "a reprisal" for having thrown a fence when an officer had hit him with a baton.

Nine years after the 1-O, four national police officers sit this Wednesday in the dock for the rubber bullet that blinded Roger Español in one eye. They are the only officers who will be tried for the charges of a day with a thousand injured. The Prosecutor's Office has requested their acquittal because it believes they were doing their job and the State Attorney's Office is defending them. Even so, Español's complaint and the popular accusations of Irídia, the ANC and Òmnium have caused the case to reach the trial that begins this Wednesday, in which the officers face sentences of up to 13 years in prison and disqualification for the crimes of torture and injuries with the loss of an organ.

Francesc Augé, the man who has been waiting two years for euthanasia because a judicial appeal stopped it, is hospitalized after a suicide attempt last weekend. The Generalitat authorized the assisted death in August 2024, which the patient requested after three strokes and two heart attacks that left him with significant movement and speech impairments. Despite having the approval of the Guarantee and Evaluation Commission of Catalonia (CGAC), his request became stalled due to a judicial appeal filed by his father.

Prisons are resorting to all options available to accommodate more than 9,500 inmates, a figure that accounts for 95% of the system's total capacity. Saturation in many modules affects the day-to-day life of prisoners and staff, and the prison sources consulted by ARA agree that having more people in the same space encourages more tensions and conflicts. "There end up being more tense situations over things you wouldn't even think about outside of a prison. For having to queue for breakfast, because someone else finished the milk... When there are many, small tensions are harder to see and can trigger incidents," a prison educator explains to ARA. "There is more movement, more cunning, and the ratio of professionals remains the same," she adds.

At the Figueres prison, there are inmates sleeping in the infirmary instead of the usual modules because there is no room for them there, and in the last week, a dozen inmates at Lledoners were serving isolation sanctions in the admissions module, where they normally only place those who have just arrived at the prison. These are two of the situations that different prison system workers have explained to ARA, all with the same reason: there are more and more prisoners, and the space in the prisons is the same. Five years ago, there were 1,800 fewer prisoners than now, which means that the prison population has grown by 23% and the prison system is approaching its limit. According to public data from the Department of Justice, right now the prisons are at 95%: on August 31, there were 9,597 prisoners and the total capacity of the system is 10,016.

Records show that crimes committed by minors are decreasing, but the Public Prosecutor's Office warns of the opposite. There are increasingly more crimes that cannot be prosecuted because the offender is under 14 years old and, therefore, has not reached the age of criminal responsibility. These cases do not appear in the counts of convictions for minors, but there are more and more of them. In the last year, they have risen by 74%, according to the count from the State Attorney General's Office: last year 4,448 cases were archived because the offender was unaccountable, while in 2023 there were 7,749. However, the Prosecutor's Office warns that the exact figure should be taken with reservations due to a possible error in the 2024 records in Andalusia. Nationwide, in 2023, 11,143 cases were archived for this reason, 7,660 in 2022, and 8,433 in 2021. "The age of commission of criminal acts is progressively dropping," warns the Prosecutor's Office report presented this Thursday.

Zakaria crossed the Melilla fence in March 2022, fleeing the armed conflict in his country, Mali, when he was still a minor. That day, baton blows to the face from a civil guard caused an irreversible injury to his left eye, where he has lost his vision. Less than two years later, he continues to ask the justice system to identify the name of the officer, and this Wednesday he took an important step in the proceedings by explaining to the judge everything he experienced that day. "I am here so that justice can verify what happened; I do not want it to happen to anyone else," he said after testifying.

The Director General of Penal Execution in the Community and Juvenile Justice, Jesús del Cacho, has resigned after two years in office. The Government appointed the new director, criminal lawyer Paz Vallès, this very Tuesday.

For nine months, Collserola has been emptied of hikers and cyclists who found it a quick escape from the city. The outbreak of African swine fever (ASF), which already totals 384 positive cases, has forced extreme measures to be taken to prevent the virus from spreading, and to reinforce the closure of the natural park when the infections reached Barcelona. Aside from farms and slaughterhouses, a sector fully affected by this situation are the restaurateurs accustomed to serving breakfasts and lunches to cyclists and hikers who have not made an appearance for months. Despite the aid approved this week, the restaurants that ARA has spoken to agree in explaining the difficulties they are going through, some to the point of considering closing, and which they all describe as more serious than those caused by the coronavirus pandemic.