THE Scot locked up in a Barcelona jail for six weeks after being branded a “flight risk” because of Brexit has said he feared Spanish authorities would make an example of him and keep him imprisoned indefinitely.

William Aitken had gone out skateboarding with friends on the evening of February 17 – the second consecutive night of protests supporting rapper Pablo Hasel, who had been jailed for his lyrics likening the monarchy to the mafia.

When they took a train to return to the city centre, they came out of the station and walked into the middle of one of the protests.

Aitken was arrested by plainclothes officers from the Catalan police called the Mossos.

They claimed they had video footage of him throwing objects and building barricades across the street.

He was arrested along with six other demonstrators who were all released the following day.

However, Aitken was taken to the Brians 1 penitentiary and was only released last Friday – his 31st birthday – after The National publicised his case, along with Catalan media and his former MP in Hamilton Angela Crawley.

“I was very scared to be made an example of during this situation,” he said last night in an online discussion.

“I was thinking maybe they’re going to use me as an example to say ‘you can’t come to Spain, you can’t break the law’, so I had a lot of fear about being used as an example.

“But again, my lawyer reassured me that most of the stuff that I had heard and was believing was just more or less scaremongering, it wasn’t really true, just hearsay.

“I was very paranoid over being made an example of because of the Brexit situation.”

The Brexit situation was what led to Aitken’s six-week detention, after a judge ruled that in a post-Brexit Europe there was no mechanism to ensure he would return to court if he were to be freed, such as the European arrest warrant.

This ruling came despite his partner, Fernanda Soler, lodging with the court documents confirming his four-year residency in Barcelona, his banking details and confirmation that he has worked for the same telecoms company for the past four years.

However, a more senior judge last week disagreed with the earlier finding when Aitken’s lawyer, David Aranda, appealed to a higher court.

As we followed up our original story, it was also picked up by Catalan media and wider social media.

Aitken said: “I don’t know if I was the only person in the prison from the UK, but it certainly felt like it after the story was in the paper and it was getting bigger and bigger as more people followed and shared it.

“Social media definitely blew the case up. There was an events coordinator who came into the prison on weekdays to do arts and crafts and whatever.

“One morning she came in and came straight over to me, marching, and she said ‘last night, I see your face on my Instagram, my friends, we’re sharing your thing – hashtag Free William Aitken’.

“Then it really hit home to me, this is actually getting out there somehow from inside the prison ... then the social media aspect of it, which was very, very nice.”

He used his time in prison to improve his Spanish and to help teach English, but he admits he is among the lucky ones.

“There’s so many people who are trapped in jail, waiting for trials. It seems there’s people who have already waited 12 to 14 months in this very, very slow system where you really need a Catalan lawyer to appeal your case faster.”

And there may also be good news for his trial whenever that might be: “My lawyer has investigated the evidence that the police said they have, and there’s nothing.

“They don’t have [a] solid shred of evidence that I’m actually doing anything wrong.”