"He threw me out of my wheelchair and started hitting me mercilessly": the account of a brutal attack in Toledo

Arturo is heading home to Toledo along the usual route he takes every afternoon in his wheelchair when a group of young people confront him. One of them shouts, imitating the sound of a speeding motorcycle and a Formula 1 car as Arturo advances until he comes face to face with them. At that moment, you ask them if something is happening. The response is immediate: one of the young men "starts to get aggressive and insulting, insults me, and I ask him, please, to let me go," but he doesn't succeed. Without time to react, Arturo finds himself on the ground, alone and without help.

His attacker had just used force. He grabbed the wheelchair by the front and overturned it with Arturo sitting in it. "He threw me out of the wheelchair and started hitting me mercilessly ," he recalls to ABC, feeling helpless about that moment when they also deprived him of his cell phone. "They mocked me, they laughed, and when I managed to get my phone back, one of them started hitting me on the head ," he says.

His attacker was arrested thanks to citizen collaboration , not for beating this disabled person, but for contempt of authority, since the 29-year-old young man, an irregular resident of Toledo, confronted the officers.

Armed with the medical report and the complaint, Arturo awaits the trial to turn the page and forget . Even if the physical consequences heal, he says, he will never erase this episode of violence and cruelty from his mind.

ABC has contacted attorney José María San Román to delve deeper into the details of this incident. "What happened constitutes a clear case of a hate crime under Article 510 of the Penal Code, which punishes those who promote, encourage, incite, or carry out certain acts or behaviors of hatred, violence, or discrimination against people for reasons such as their disability, among other reasons," he says.

In light of the facts, the lawyer points out, everything seems to indicate that "we are not dealing with a random attack, but rather an alleged deliberate attack with both physical and psychological dimensions against a person who is vulnerable simply because they are vulnerable."

The protection of the various vulnerable groups subject to the criminal classification of hate crimes, San Román points out, "is a democratic necessity because these types of offenses threaten coexistence, human dignity and the principle of equality ," adding that any aggression "motivated by prejudice or a fixation towards a substantive element of the victim's personality, which is the essence of the criminal type that may be allegedly subsumed under the events that occurred, is configured as a flagrant attack on the fundamental values of our society."