Tourist attacked in Bournemouth for 'speaking Spanish'
Saturday, October 22, 2016 @ 10:09 PM
THE wave of racism in Great Britain which arose post-Brexit vote has now seen Spaniards targeted as well as Poles and Commonwealth natives – even though back in summer Spanish residents in the UK admitted they had mostly managed to escape xenophobic attacks.
In the latest incident, a tourist was hit over the head with a wooden plaque ripped from a partition wall when his attacker heard him speaking Spanish to a young woman in Bournemouth, Dorset.
Tomás Gil was conversing with the woman on the street when Daniel Way shouted, “[Expletive] Spanish! Speak English!” and ripped the wooden panel off the wall of a building site, hitting Tomás repeatedly over the head with it until he fell to the groun.
The young woman who had been talking to Gil in Spanish, and other bystanders, rushed to his aid.
Way escaped a 12-month jail sentence and has got away with just 150 hours of community service and compensation payable to the victim of 800 pounds (around €890).
In an earlier case, a Spanish woman stood up to an attacker who punched her Bangladeshi husband in the face on the London underground at Upton Park station.
Kilian Ahmed's husband Jubair were on their way to Whitechapel from their home in Barking, east London, on the District line, when a man started to insult them and threaten them because of Jubair's foreign appearance.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com