This is the horrific moment an off-duty Spanish cop choked a suspected phone thief to death in front of passersby as they pleaded with him to ‘let him breathe’.
The unnamed 58-year-old policeman was out for dinner with a friend on Tuesday in the Spanish town of Torrejon de Ardoz in northeastern Madrid when a man allegedly stole his phone and ran off.
The alleged thief was chased by the cop, who slammed him to the ground and held him in a neck restraint.
A disturbing video shows the police officer, dressed in plain clothes, lying on the ground as he holds the man in a deadly chokehold.
‘Call the police’, the cop calls out to onlookers as his victim lies motionlessly on the pavement.
Neighbours are heard pleading with him to let go of the man, telling him: ‘[The police] are nearly here…please let him breathe’.
But he ignores them and continues to press into the man’s neck.
‘Sir, please get off him. The police will be here soon…please let him breathe a little bit’, a man off-camera says.
The policeman’s friend, also understood to be an off-duty officer, is seen crouching on the ground as a passerby kicks him.
Police arrive at the scene, and the video cuts out.
The suspected phone snatcher, a 35-year-old man of Moroccan origin, was unresponsive by the time officers arrived at the scene and soon went into cardiac arrest.
Despite efforts from paramedics to save him, he was pronounced dead at the scene.
First responders said he died by strangulation, but an autopsy will be carried out to determine his cause of death.
The unnamed cop was arrested and interviewed by authorities. He is set to appear in court on Thursday.
The two off-duty cops are understood to have been drinking. A judge investigating the case has requested that the detained police officer be given a breathalyser test.
Sources close to the investigation say the victim had recently been released from prison, Spanish newspaper El Pais reports.
The shocking incident has sparked outrage in Spain, with politicians condemning the treatment of the suspected thief and demanding an immediate investigation.
‘Two police officers, who were apparently under the influence of alcohol, have murdered a person in Torrejón. This reflects how institutional racism and abuse of power are normalized, even outside of working hours,’ a spokesperson for political party Más Madrid spokesperson said in Congress.
‘We demand an immediate investigation into this alleged murder due to asphyxiation caused by a police officer in Torrejón’, Más Madrid added in a social media post.
The clip, which has gone viral on social media, has also prompted horrified responses from Spanish internet users.
‘Murdering a person for a simple phone. An off-duty municipal police officer suffocates a person…This is how the capitalist world is, a telephone is worth more than a person’s life. What a disgusting society!’, one X user wrote.
Another user likened the strangling of the man in Madrid to the brutal killing of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer in 2020.
”I can’t breathe.’ These were the words George Floyd uttered minutes before his death when a New York police officer killed him by asphyxiation. The same incident was repeated today in Madrid’, an X user wrote on the social platform.
Floyd was killed on May 2025, 2020, in a brutal act of police brutality when cop Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for nine minutes.
His killing cued widespread protests in the US and propelled the Black Lives Matter movement to the forefront of American politics.
The death of a man at the hands of police in Spain comes years after Madrid was rocked by violent riots when a Senegalese street vendor died while being chased by cops in 2018
Mame Mbaye Ndiaye, 35, had been selling his wares on the central Puerta del Sol square, which attracts scores of tourists daily, when police intervened.
Fellow vendors said police chased him through the streets, forcing him to run with his heavy merchandise wrapped in a sheet.
He went into cardiac arrest and died in a street close to his home in the Madrid neighbourhood of Lavapies some 15 to 20 minutes later.
When Mr Ndiaye suffered the cardiac arrest, he was with a friend who called the police. Several officers arrived and tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate him.
His death sparked outrage in the Spanish capital, resulting in violent clashes between police and protestors.
