“A colleague told me today that yesterday he went through the door of the burned block and found a man calling the Policeman because there was someone shouting that he was going to kill everyone”.
explains it Thomas Fernandez, President of the Federation of Neighborhood Associations of Santa Coloma de Gramenet (FAVGRAM), where on the morning of May 4, specifically at number 23 Calle Sant Joaquim in the neighborhood Riu Nordthree people have died due to a fire that seems to have been intentional due to problems of coexistence, as the mayor of the city herself has publicly explained, Nuria Parlon.
Despite the anecdote related to the day before the events, however, Fernández, president of the FAVGRAMsays that he had no record of the occupations of most of the flats in the block – regularized a posteriori, yes, with social rentals between owner and squatters – nor of the deterioration of coexistence on the farm.
“We had news that a few months ago something happened there [en referencia al fallecimiento de una persona electrocutada en esa misma finca hace unos meses, a la que también ha hecho alusión la propia alcaldesa]but it did not transcend”, Fernandez ditch.
“We didn’t know anything about that block, but substandard housing is a fact”
On the ground, some individual residents do admit to being aware of the conflicts in the burned block. This is the case of a neighbor who asks to identify himself as A.M, who previously lived in a flat just opposite the scene of the incident.
“It is a building occupied for quite some time by diverse people, and apparently in recent times there had been various messes. It had always been a conflictive estate: fights, parties…”, he affirms. A.M., who is not surprised by what happened: “Among the people of the neighborhood we knew that, in the same way that things had happened in Badalona, some misfortune was going to happen here too”.
However, the close view of the residents of Sant Joaquim Street contrasts with that of the neighborhood organizations of Santa Coloma. This is exemplified Santi Tornero, secretary of the Riu Nord Neighborhood Associationthe neighborhood to which the burned property belongs, who states that, despite the usual problems typical of the metropolitan area that Santa Coloma may suffer from, “I had no idea about this particular block.”
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“I didn’t know anything about the occupation in this block specifically, although we do know that substandard housing and the need for decent housing is a fact in our city and in so many others,” concludes Tornero.
More news from Santa Coloma in the local edition of EL PERIÓDICO