An off-duty policeman is in critical condition in hospital Monday evening after he climbed into the lion’s enclosure at Barcelona zoo.
At midday on Sunday the 45-year-old man, named as Justo José MP, who was wearing military clothing, climbed the fence that separates the lions from the tigers, and headed towards the lions. It was a holiday weekend and the zoo was crowded with families who looked on in horror as he was attacked by a male and two females who dragged him into the four-metre deep moat that separates the animals from the public.
“The man, who was very tall and thin and was dressed in camouflage, approached the moat where a lioness jumped on him and dragged him to the ditch,” one eyewitness said. “The lions didn’t want to kill him, they were playing with him,” Ignasi Armengol, a spokesman for the city council, said.
People threw stones at the lions until emergency services drove the lions off with hosepipes and fire extinguishers, but it was half an hour before the man was finally rescued and taken to hospital.
Police sources say he was on unpaid leave and was a member of the local police force. They added that the same man, also dressed in fatigues, was arrested after he suspended swastikas from the scaffolding on the architect Antoni Gaudí’s La Pedrera building last month in a protest that compared abortion to the Nazis.
He was also arrested in September for burning a Catalan independence flag and a Palestinian flag in the city centre. On Monday night he was in a critical condition in the traumatology department of Vall d’Hebron hospital in Barcelona.
