Barcelona (EFE).- An Espanyol fan has accepted a year in prison and a two-year ban from attending football matches on Wednesday for booing with racist shouts and gestures at Athletic Bilbao’s black footballer Iñaki Williams, in a LaLiga match at the Cornellà-El Prat stadium in January 2020.
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The racist incident occurred on January 25, 2020, during a League match between Espanyol and Athletic Club in Cornellà-El Prat, when between 2:26 p.m. and 2:28 p.m. Iñaki Williams, a black player from the visiting team, received boos and racist insults when he was substituted. Specifically, the Prosecution maintains in the indictment that this Wednesday the investigated party fully assumed, part of the Espanyol fans booed the black footballer simulating the gestures of primates and repeatedly shouting “uh, uh, uh, uh”, onomatopoeia with which they intended to imitate the sounds of monkeys. The boos came from a part of the white and blue stadium located in sector 108 of the stands, where K.G.B., of Spanish nationality, was located, who “personally, among many”, according to the Prosecutor’s Office, acted “with evident contempt for the black color of the player’s skin”. The defendant shouted and staged “racist gestures of contempt” against Williams, generating in the footballer “feelings of frustration, shame and humiliation” with the consequent impairment of his dignity, according to the account that the defendant has accepted this Wednesday. Due to the agreement reached between the defense and the prosecution, the Court has issued a sentence without the need to carry out the rest of the trial evidence, which included the testimony of Iñaki Williams himself. Williams felt «humiliated»
During the instruction of the case, the Athletic Bilbao footballer assured the judge that he felt «humiliated» by the racist insults and confessed to feeling indignant that events of this nature continue to occur in the 21st century. The case for the racist insults against Iñaki Williams was opened following a pioneering lawsuit by the then Barcelona prosecutor Miguel Ángel Aguilar – now a prosecutor of the Supreme Court against hate crimes and discrimination and the first in Spain to coordinate that specialization – after a complaint filed with the Public Prosecutor’s Office by the National Football League, which appeared as a plaintiff. The Prosecutor’s Office commissioned an investigation to the Mossos d’Esquadra, who managed to identify the alleged perpetrators of the insults after examining the images from the security cameras and thanks to the information provided by RCD Espanyol about the holders of the locations from where the shouts came.
