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News > World

Portugal: Anti-Riot Forces Repress Protest of Racist Policing

  • Julieta Joia Luvunga shows the wounds she says were caused by the police in the Jamaica neighborhood of Seixal, Portugal Jan. 22, 2019.

    Julieta Joia Luvunga shows the wounds she says were caused by the police in the Jamaica neighborhood of Seixal, Portugal Jan. 22, 2019. | Photo: Reuters

Published 22 January 2019
Opinion

Protestors in Portugal clashed with police at a rally against racist police violence. 

Hours after a protest against police violence ended in clashes in Portugal, unidentified attackers threw petrol bombs at a police station in the Portuguese city of Setubal and torched cars in the capital of Lisbon, authorities said.

Police said in a statement that three Molotov cocktails caused unspecified damage to the station in the early hours Tuesday but nobody was hurt.

Police said their investigation could not establish any links to a rally in central Lisbon Monday night, which followed a police raid on a slum in Seixal, on the outskirts of the capital south of the Tagus River. Setubal is about 50 kilometers south of Lisbon.

On Sunday, police, responding to a call about a brawl between two women, entered the neighborhood of Jamaica with a large number in the town of Seixal.

A video published on the internet showed police officers beating up several Black men. Four local residents and one police officer were lightly injured and treated in the hospital. One person was arrested.

Rights group SOS Racismo said the police response was unjustified and requested that the prosecutor’s office open an investigation.

On Monday night, about two hundred mostly Black protesters blocked Lisbon’s Avenida da Liberdade thoroughfare, chanting “Down with racism!”

Police said Tuesday that one person was arrested on suspicion of torching four vehicles and a dozen garbage cans Monday night in greater Lisbon’s Odivelas district.

There are several poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of Lisbon where immigrants mostly from Portugal’s African ex-colonies live.

Race-related violence is rare in Portugal but in one incident in 2015, 18 police officers were charged with crimes motivated by racism.

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