Hundreds of Chinese citizens staged a rare protest Friday at an office of Spain's BBVA bank in Madrid, angrily denouncing that their personal accounts had been frozen without prior warning. Waving Chinese and Spanish flags, the protesters shouted "racist BBVA" and "we want justice," carrying banners reading "stop banking racism."

Contacted by AFP, BBVA, the second biggest bank in Spain, was not able to detail how many clients had been affected. In a statement, it said it had frozen accounts to comply with measures to fight money-laundering, adding it was working to resolve the problem. Protesters said other banks had also frozen accounts of citizens of Chinese origin recently, but to a lesser extent than BBVA.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2019