MADRID - Spanish police have arrested four Frenchmen for jumping in front of cars on a busy road so that they could film them and post the footage on the Internet, the newspaper El Pais said Tuesday.

The four jokers took turns to leap in front of cars, forcing the drivers to swerve or brake sharply and putting themselves and other vehicles in danger, town hall officials in Alicante were quoted as saying on the El Pais Web site.

Their intention was to film the reaction of drivers, on the road between Benidorm to La Nucia, and post them on the Web, the officials said.

Relatively rare in Spain, a youth craze known as "happy slapping" took off in Britain last year, in which groups of teenagers slapped or mugged strangers while filming the victims' reaction on camera phones. The images were then sent to friends or posted on Web sites.

Spanish police and local government officials were unavailable for comment.