Officers belonging to the Policía Nacional, working with the Mossos d`Esquadra, arrested just under 100 people over graffiti on train carriages.

Of the 99 arrests, 48 took place in Cataluña for the defacing with graffiti of RENFE rollings stock, as well as metro trains in Barcelona during 2017, 2018 and 2019.

The cost of repainting the carriages and wagons is estimated at a staggering 22-million euros.

The investigation work started in 2019 when several graffiti artists that had been arrested outside Cataluña commented on how easy it was to spray graffiti in Cataluña, almost with impunity.

They went through all the formal complaints received from RENFE from all over Spain and the Barcelona Metro during those three years and noticed that just under half had taken place in Cataluña.

The Spanish Transport Police looked into a total of 6,741 complaint reports – 4,981 from RENFE and 1,850 from the Metro and solved 602 RENFE cases and 438 Metro ones, allegedly carried out by 90 suspects.

The arrests were carried out in two stages, with those living outside Cataluña being rounded up first. Fifty-one suspects were detained in Madrid, Castilla-León, Castilla-La Mancha, Oviedo, País Vasco, Aragón, Valencia and Andalucía.

Stage Two required the assistance of the Catalán regional police, the Mossos d´Esquadra, and resulted in 48 suspects, residents in Barcelona, Tarragona y Girona.

Interestingly, one of those arrested in Barcelona was a young woman working in a train-station ticket office. Another graffiti artist travelled from Milan in Italy to Barcelona for the sole reason of painting rolling stock. He was arrested on the tarmac of the Aeropuerto de Barcelona-El Prat just after he had landed.

The investigation continues and is expected to produce more arrests.

(News: Cataluña, Spain)