Badalona mayor in court over anti-Gypsy flyers

Xavier García Albiol, the controversial Popular Party (PP) mayor of Catalonia's third-biggest city, Badalona, on Wednesday admitted before a judge that he had committed a "verbal excess" when branding Romanian Gypsies a "menace" who "have come exclusively to commit crimes."

Albiol spent more than an hour defending himself in court against a suit brought by SOS Racismo for distributing 16,000 xenophobic pamphlets in April 2010, just prior to regional elections, in which he linked immigration to crime.

Later outside on the street and protected by the Catalan PP and locals, however, he adopted a bolder tone, presenting himself as a victim of persecution. "They will not silence me with political denunciations," he said.

The mayor won the May 22 local elections thanks, in part, to his tough-on-immigration stance.