Another unconfirmed media story linking foreigners with crime in Portuguese towns and cities
Three men are credited with having scaled a wall of Hotel GAT, in Lisbon’s Rossio district, in the early hours, and trying to “break through various doors, with the intention of robbing guests”.
Failing in this regard, they are understood to have turned their attentions to stealing items easier to hand.
A receptionist however, is cited as having heard the commotion (at an hour when generally guests would be fast asleep), opting to call PSP police.
“The speed of patrols” arriving at the scene prompted the three men to “make a desperate escape through a window, various metres above ground”, writes tabloid Correio da Manhã.
Even so, there were cornered by police agents who recovered a suitcase packed with 31 glasses, four boxes of paper napkins and eight packs of refuse bags”.
CM describes the trio as “two Indian men and one Pakistani, aged between 29 and 31”. The group was promptly arrested, with one requiring treatment in hospital “under police custody” for an injury to one of his feet.
Jornal de Notícias carries a similar story, failing to identify the men’s nationalities.
This is just another story that has appeared in the press recently, linking crime with foreign nationals – something the previous government/ available data failed to identify. Indeed, only recently Catarina Oliveira, of the Observatory for Migrations, insisted that in spite of the fact that crime has been seen to be increasing, it cannot be blamed on foreign citizens.
Oliveira told CNN Portugal that these false impressions come from the fact that “immigration has changed” and discourse about it in parliament and over social media has become “recurrent”.
She told the station last week: “I will never forget that episode when people were killed at the Ismaili Centre, and André Ventura came right out and said: “you see, refugees are all criminals, they’re terrorists. This generalising impression has this multiplying effect. It didn’t exist before”.
To make matters even more ‘curious’, Portugal Resident has called Hotel Gat, to confirm the story, and the response to our short email query “was the hotel assaulted along the lines described by Correio da Manhã”, relatively quickly elicited the response: “We cannot confirm the news described”.
This is the second story in a week, allegedly highlighting incidents involving ‘foreign residents’, which on closer inspection do not appear to hold up.
