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Riot cops to shoot ‘thugs’ with helmet cameras

Troublemakers at Spanish football grounds will find it harder to hide now that Spanish anti-riot cops are set to wear high-tech cameras in their helmets.

Riot cops to shoot 'thugs' with helmet cameras
Spain's anti-riot police have been under scrutiny in recent months for what a sector of Spanish society claims are excessively violent methods. Photo: Pedro Armestre/AFP

The move has been backed by Spain's Football Association RFEF, which has already given 18 prototypes to Spain's Police Intervention Unit UIP.

Their aim is to more easily identify aggressors whenever fights break out at Spanish stadiums as well as to assess the behaviour of police officers during altercations.

"It'll be an improvement in safety for everybody," a spokesperson for the UIP told Spanish news agency Europa Press.

Up to now, anti-riot cops at sporting events in Spain have had to carry handheld camcorders to monitor brawls, a method which left a lot of questions unanswered about who the main perpetrators were and if police had used the correct modus operandi.

Spain's anti-riot police have been under scrutiny in recent months for what a sector of Spanish society claims are excessively violent methods during the countless street protests the country is seeing.

Last Tuesday, a Barcelona judge ordered two Catalan anti-riot officers to testify before him after a woman claimed she lost an eye when a rubber bullet hit her during a November 14 demonstration.

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POLICE

Denmark convicts man over bomb joke at airport

A Danish court on Thursday gave a two-month suspended prison sentence to a 31-year-old Swede for making a joke about a bomb at Copenhagen's airport this summer.

Denmark convicts man over bomb joke at airport

In late July, Pontus Wiklund, a handball coach who was accompanying his team to an international competition, said when asked by an airport agent that
a bag of balls he was checking in contained a bomb.

“We think you must have realised that it is more than likely that if you say the word ‘bomb’ in response to what you have in your bag, it will be perceived as a threat,” the judge told Wiklund, according to broadcaster TV2, which was present at the hearing.

The airport terminal was temporarily evacuated, and the coach arrested. He later apologised on his club’s website.

“I completely lost my judgement for a short time and made a joke about something you really shouldn’t joke about, especially in that place,” he said in a statement.

According to the public prosecutor, the fact that Wiklund was joking, as his lawyer noted, did not constitute a mitigating circumstance.

“This is not something we regard with humour in the Danish legal system,” prosecutor Christian Brynning Petersen told the court.

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