“I am the first doctor convicted in Spain for practising euthanasia,” he informs the public at the tiny Teatro del Barrio in the Lavapies neighbourhood which is known for its leftist roots.

“I wish that tonight you judge me,” he later adds during the play which premiered on Thursday and which recounts Hourmann´s real life experiences.

The play, called “Celebrare mi muerte” or “I Will Celebrate My Death”, comes as Spain gears up for a snap general election on April 28.

Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has promised to make Spain the fourth country in Europe to legalise euthanasia after Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands if he wins a majority in parliament — a move fiercely opposed by the main opposition conservative Popular Party (PP).

“This is a gift that I am being given, to be able to spew” words never before said Hourmann, a 59-year-old Argentine-born doctor who was convicted of killing a terminally ill patient without trial.

During the 75-minute play he recounts how in March 2005 he was the duty doctor at a hospital in Tarragona in northeastern Spain when an 82-year-old woman named Carmen who had colon cancer and multiple other ailments arrived.

Hourmann tells the audience that the woman told him twice that she wanted to die but he first did what was expected of him — he tried to save her life. When there was no more hope legally sedated her to ease her pain.

But a nurse later woke him up “because Carmen continued to choke. Her daughter told me: ‘I can’t see her like that’,” he adds during the play.

Hourmann then gave Carmen with a fatal dose of potassium chloride.

“If I could no longer help her live, isn’t it my duty as a doctor to help her die?,” Hourmann asks the audience.

– ‘Hypocrisies’ –

Just two weeks before he was set to go on trial in 2009, public prosecutors proposed a plea deal which Hourmann accepted.

Instead of facing a possible ten year sentence for homicide, he was convicted of the lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter and handed a one year suspended sentence, meaning he did not spend any time behind bars.

Hourmann moved to Britain where he worked as a doctor but in 2010 British tabloid The Sun launched a campaign against him, dubbing him a “killer doctor” and he became unemployed.

A voice off stage asks Hourmann during the play why he registered Carmen’s cause of death as being by lethal injection, which is what led to him being charged.

“If I did not write it, it would be going against my ideas,” he responds, adding he rejects “hypocrisies”.

– ‘End pain’ –

The play is careful to include the arguments of experts and lawmakers who are “totally opposed to euthanasia,” its director, Alberto San Juan, said.

A doctor argues in one scene that medical ethics allow physicians to “end pain” but prohibit “ending a patient’s life”.

Euthanasia has long grabbed public attention in Spain, which has the world’s second-highest life expectancy.

Spanish-Chilean director Alejandro Amenabar won the Oscar for best foreign language film in 2005 for “The Sea Inside”, based on the real story of a paraplegic Spanish fisherman’s 29-year campaign to win the right to end his own life with assisted suicide.

Fully 84 percent of Spaniards back euthanasia for terminally ill patients who conserve their mental faculties, according to a survey published last year in daily newspaper La Vanguardia.

Spain’s ruling Socialists in June presented a draft law on legalising euthanasia which was backed by far-left party Podemos but the PP and centre-right Ciudadanos blocked it in a parliamentary committee in October.

“The Socialist party is expert in creating inexistant problems,” PP leader Pablo Casado at the time, adding the state should not intervene in people’s “conscience”.

Authorities have banned demonstrations in a large area in the west of the city, including the Champs-Elysees, the scene of last week’s rampage by hundreds of black-clad agitators.

Dozens of police vehicles, including armoured trucks and water cannons, encircled the Arc de Triomphe at the top of the iconic avenue, with officers searching people’s bags and patrolling in front of boarded-up storefronts.

At the opposite end of the avenue access was completely blocked to the Place de la Concorde, near the presidential palace and the National Assembly, and two drones were flying over the capital to help officers track any protesters’ movements.

Yellow vest organisers had called on social media for protests elsewhere in Paris, including the Trocadero square in front of the Eiffel Tower at the Place de la Republique, though both areas were calm early Saturday.

But banks and other businesses remained shut in several parts of the city, their windows protected with planks of wood, and some schools had cancelled Saturday classes in anticipation of further violence.

Protest bans were also in effect in the centres of Toulouse, Bordeaux, Dijon, Rennes and the southern city of Nice, where Chinese President Xi Jinping is to meet his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron this weekend.

Macron is under pressure to avoid a repeat of last week’s sacking of the Champs-Elysees, where over 100 shops were damaged, looted or set alight during seven hours of rioting by mainly masked, black-clad protesters.

The government has redeployed soldiers from its Sentinelle anti-terror force to guard public buildings on Saturday, freeing up the 6,000 deployed police in Paris to tackle any flare-ups of violence.

The move has drawn fierce criticism from opposition parties, who have accused the government of playing with fire.

On social media, several “yellow vest” leaders urged caution for Saturday, warning demonstrators against appearing to countenance the violence by far-left or far-right infiltrators.

In a YouTube post, truck driver Eric Drouet called on protesters not to try to return to the Champs-Elysees.

“It’s a very, very bad idea. You know what image they’re trying to create of us,” he said, predicting a “quiet Saturday”.

– ‘Zero tolerance’ –

Macron’s government drew fierce criticism over its handling of last week’s protests, when police appeared to hang back during the wave of rioting and vandalism that swept the Champs-Elysees.

Analysts say the authorities may have been reluctant to engage the rioters after the dozens of injuries sustained by participants in previous protests.

But this week officials vowed “zero tolerance” for more violence.

“He needs to show the world that the government has a handle on the country and on the capital,” said Sylvian, the leader of a team of repair workers still clearing away debris on the avenue on Friday.

The Paris police chief was fired over his handling of the violence, which saw dozens of windows shattered by people hurling paving stones and wielding hammers and other makeshift weapons.

The protests began in rural France on November 17 over fuel tax increases and quickly ballooned into a full-scale anti-government rebellion that two months of public policy debates have failed to defuse.

In recent weeks, the protesters’ numbers have dwindled, falling from 282,000 nationwide on the first Saturday to just 32,000 last week, according to official estimates.

But those still on the streets appear more determined than ever to make their presence felt.

In a Facebook video this week, Maxime Nicolle one of the movement’s figureheads, explained the periodic rioting in Paris and other cities as the result of “40 years of being beaten psychologically and financially” by successive governments.

“It’s a bit as if a battered woman beats up her boyfriend and you say she’s the violent one,” he said.

The violence has cost the protesters much of the public support they enjoyed early in the movement, which seeks higher taxes on the rich and a greater say for ordinary people in the running of the country.

Some 53 percent of respondents said they either supported or felt a degree of sympathy towards the movement, down eight points in a week, according to a poll released Wednesday.

The decision by Nigeria’s electoral board to void March 9 elections in six states came two weeks after President Muhammadu Buhari won a second term in a poll denounced by his main rival as fraudulent.

The INEC, the National Electoral Commission, said violence and other irregularities had prompted voting to be cancelled in some areas of Kano and Sokoto, in the northwest, Bauchi and Adamawa in the northwest, and the central states of Benue and Plateau.

Another poll, in Rivers state, had been suspended.

Around half a million registered voters were eligible to cast their ballot Saturday.

Results are expected from early next week.

The governorship races in the six states are closely fought between the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

State parliamentary elections were also taking place across the country.

Tempers have been frayed since Buhari’s re-election, with the defeated PDP candidate Atiku Abubakar challenging the result in an election tribunal and claiming that results in several states were manipulated.

Election observers meanwhile criticised the organisation and running of the governorship and state elections, as well as presidential and parliamentary polls on February 23, citing reports of vote buying and intimidation.

Situation Room, an umbrella group of more than 70 civil society organisations monitoring the vote, has called for an independent inquiry into the entire election process.

The PDP denounced INEC’s decision to halt voting in affected states, claiming it was “clearly leading the (governorship) race,” accusing INEC of collusion with the ruling party.

INEC was “seeking ways to use the situation to aid the APC to alter the results and announce APC candidates as winners”, it said in a statement Monday.

Buhari’s APC won 13 states in the governorship elections, with the PDP winning 9.

Regional elections are fiercely contested in Nigeria, where governors are powerful and influential figures, controlling state finances and responsible for key areas from education to health.

Buhari will hope to consolidate his re-election victory whilst the opposition PDP seeks to claw back power at the state level.

A week after Tropical Cyclone Idai lashed Mozambique with winds of nearly 200 kilometres (120 miles) per hour, survivors are struggling in desperate conditions — some still trapped on roof tops and those saved needing food and facing the risk of outbreaks of disease such as cholera.

The World Food Programme late Friday night declared the flood crisis a level three emergency, putting it on a par with crises in Yemen, Syria and South Sudan.

“The designation will accelerate the massive operational scale-up now underway to assist victims of last week’s Category 4 cyclone and subsequent large-scale flooding that claimed countless lives and displaced at least 600,000 people,” said WFP spokesman Herve Verhoosel.

The confirmed death toll in Mozambique and neighbouring Zimbabwe topped 550 on Friday, with 293 killed in Mozambique, and 259 in Zimbabwe, according to the UN Migration agency IOM.

Around 1.7 million people have been affected and hundreds are still missing.

“Now that the world is beginning to grasp the scale of devastation and despair in the wake of Cyclone Idai, we as an international community are at a crucial moment to act,” Verhoosel said.

‘Like Yemen, Syria’

Humanitarian agencies are racing against the clock to help people, many of whom have not had a meal in days.

Poor sanitary conditions mean disease is now a real concern.

“Already, some cholera cases have been reported in (the port city of) Beira along with an increasing number of malaria infections among people trapped by the flooding,” the International Federation of the Red Cross said in a statement.

“We are running out of time, it is at a critical point here,” UN children’s agency chief Henrietta Fore told AFP after she flew into the devastated port city of Beira from New York.

Hygiene and safe drinking water are absolute priorities, she warned.

“There’s stagnant water, it’s not draining, decomposing bodies, lack of good hygiene and sanitation,” Fore said. “We are worried about cholera, about malaria because of the stagnant water.”

Aid group Doctors Without Borders said people were also at risk of respiratory infections such as pneumonia.

Relief agencies said the gravity of the cyclone and scale of the flooding it unleashed was shocking.

Districts west of Beira resemble an inland lake, and thousands of people are still trapped on roof tops and in trees where they sought to escape the flood waters.

The town of Buzi across the estuary southwest of Beira “has reportedly disappeared, with the water as high as the palm trees,” the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said.

“This… is a catastrophe,” Prime Minister Carlos Antonio do Rosario told reporters in Beira. The government says there are still around 15,000 people needing to be saved.

Tens of thousands of people are already in shelters in central Mozambique.

In Beira, businessman Ibraimo Masquine counted his blessings. “I cant believe I’m here. I was scared for my life, (for) my family,” he said as he cleared debris from his factory.

“I tell you straight, these coming days are very difficult. I wait for epidemic, some (kind of) epidemic. People (are) going to die,” he said adding there is “no clean water to drink, no food”.

In Beira’s Samora Machel Secondary School, where President Filipe Nyusi was educated, more than 1,000 people have found shelter, with many sleeping on the floor of an indoor basketball court.

“Everything is difficult here. I’m fighting for my children to have something to eat,” said Celeste Dambo.

On Wednesday, crowds of people looted a warehouse, taking away sacks of rice marked “China Aid.”

Meantime the main morgue in Beira is crowded with bodies and burials are impossible because the city cemeteries are flooded, the ICRC said.

“The mortuary at the city’s main hospital is full and there are dozens of bodies that need to be removed and cared for in a dignified way,” it added.

The ICRC has set up a dedicated website where missing people can be registered.