Lions maul neo-Nazi activist in Spain

(Times of Israel) A 45-year-old neo-Nazi activist was seriously injured by three lions after he entered the animals’ enclosure at the Barcelona zoo on Sunday.

Barcelona’s fire department was called to the northeastern city’s zoo where witnesses said they saw the man, wearing a military-style uniform, jump into the den, the city government said in a statement.

Emergency services used fire hoses to distance the lions from the man, who had been attacked and dragged into a tunnel within their enclosure.

Around half an hour after he entered the enclosure, rescue services removed the man, identified by local media as Justo Jose, and took him to a hospital where he is in serious but not life-threatening condition, the statement said.

It wasn’t Jose’s first time in the news. He was arrested on November 23 for hanging swastika banners over the Casa Milà building in Barcelona, as part of an anti-abortion demonstration. Alongside the symbol of the genocidal Nazi regime, Jose wrote on one of the banners that abortion was “murder,” according to local media.

On September 11, he was caught burning a flag near the statue of the 17th century Catalan leader Rafael Casanova, and in early November he tried to break into the Palau de la Generalitat, the seat of the Catalan government.

The spokesman for the fire department insisted that Jose’s entrance into the enclosure was deliberate, although it wasn’t immediately clear if it was a political protest.