It was 9:00 New Year’s Day when the Local Police of Vitoria-Gasteiz went to the Gaztetxe. The New Year’s Eve’s party was extended at the hill house and, due to lack of respect for the schedules, the police came to the place. Then the riots began and the officers arrested five young people for "assaulting the authority", according to reports from local police sources.

The images of what happened were immediately reversed through social networks, as well as in the press, in the face of confrontations between 150 young people and thirty local police officers.

According to the official version of the Municipal Police, the crowd surrounded two officers in the occupied building, supposedly released by their co-workers. The Gaztetxe assembly of Vitoria-Gasteiz, for its part, denounced in a statement the "police brutality" and denounced that the charges started "without warning", and accused the City Hall of wanting to offer "a wrong image of a space that has no problem".

A year and a half after the events, four of those involved have acknowledged their responsibility in the trial, according to the newspaper El Correo in its digital edition. Criminal Court No. 1 has imposed lower penalties for "crimes of attack and minor injury". Therefore, three of the defendants have been sentenced to one and a half years ' imprisonment and the fourth to three months ' imprisonment.

In the absence of a criminal record, he will not need to be imprisoned, although those convicted have been sentenced to EUR 7,000 in fines and damages. According to El Correo, a municipal police officer took 90 days to recover the mobility of a shoulder, and continues to suffer the consequences of it.

A young man incarcerated

It should also be recalled that one of the young detainees was imprisoned in Zaballa after passing through the Court of Guard for a warrant of arrest and imprisonment that preceded him for "attack on agents of the authority". The others were released pending trial.