Sentenced to 5 months in prison for a mass assault on two guards in Lanzarote

The Criminal Court number 1 of Arrecife has sentenced five and a half months in prison for a crime of attack in conjunction with injuries to five individuals who participated in the aggression suffered in 2017 in Lanzarote by two civil guards by a group of about 15 people.

The sentence declares proven that Domingo B.G., Jeffrey B.T.N., Graciliano E.H., Kilian E.D. and David F.H. attacked in the company of ten more people against two civil guards who had come to a garage in the town of La Santa where a early morning party was being held and they hit them and knocked them to the ground.

As a result, one of the agents suffered a cervicalgia that took five days to heal after a first medical assistance and the other suffered the breakage of two teeth and a deviation of the nasal septum, which required surgery and kept him on leave for 45 days.

The judge acquits, however, five more men who had been prosecuted and brought to trial for these same events, as there is not enough evidence that they participated in the aggression against the agents.

The sentence states that, according to witnesses, a Civil Guard patrol went to the area on July 22, 2017 due to the fights that were being carried out by twenty people in the street, in the early hours of the morning (between 4.30 and 5.00).

The witnesses stressed that the men involved in that incident "were out of their minds" and that they grabbed one of the agents by the neck. One of the people who watched what happened from his house went down to the street when "the commotion" passed and offered help to the attacked guards, whom he saw "in a state of shock."

The judge considers that these facts constitute a crime of attack on authority, as he has no doubt that the aggressors knew that they were attacking Civil Guard officers, since the two injured were wearing uniforms at that time.

However, the sentence rules out that the insults that the aggressors and their unidentified companions uttered against the guards can be classified as a hate crime or a crime of serious insults to the security forces, as the private prosecution intended, exercised by the association Independientes de la Guardia Civil on behalf of the two attacked agents.

For the judge, the insult they received, "fucking shitty goths", is neither one nor the other, because "not every expression of contempt integrates the hate crime, but only that which has the intention of discrediting a person as a member of a group."

In the same line, he adds that "even when the insults had been because of the victims' belonging to the Civil Guard, the facts could not fit into the hate crime, because the group of the State security force is not a minority or of special vulnerability, because the Civil Guard cannot be considered as such."

And he also recalls that the fact that the accused were attacking members of the Civil Guard has already been taken into account as an aggravating factor to qualify what happened as a crime of attack, which with other types of victims would have been classified as injuries.

In a statement, the professional association that exercised the prosecution describes as "inexplicable" that the judge acquitted six of the defendants and imposed "minimum penalties" on those convicted.

And he announces that he will appeal the sentence before the Audiencia de Las Palmas, he understands that a resolution like this "opens the door to the equivocal sensation that the aggression against the agents of the Civil Guard is free or very cheap."

"We intend to achieve justice for the attacked civil guards who safeguarded the safety of the citizens, who together with the rest of the agents of the body continue to not be recognized as a profession of risk," adds Independientes de la Guardia Civil.