MADRID: A large chunk of Catalonia’s deposed government was behind bars early Friday after a Spanish judge prompted fresh protests by ordering their detention pending probes into their role in the region’s independence drive.
Carles Puigdemont, dismissed last week as Catalan president by the Spanish government and who has since been holed up in Belgium, was issued an EU arrest warrant after failing to show at the court hearing in Madrid, his Belgian lawyer said.
In another day of high drama in Spain’s biggest crisis in decades, judge Carmen Lamela had Puigdemont’s deputy and seven other deposed regional ministers detained pending a potential trial for alleged sedition, rebellion and misuse of public funds.
With television channels showing images of police vans with flashing blue lights said to be taking the former ministers to different prisons, Catalans took to the streets in anger and disbelief.
There were protests in front of the Catalan parliament in Barcelona, the regional capital, with police estimating a crowd of 20,000. Others gathered outside town halls across the region including 8,000 people in both Girona and Tarragona.
Those in Barcelona held up their mobile phones like candles and waved separatist flags — red and yellow stripes with a white star — also holding black-and-yellow “libertad” (“freedom”) signs.
The crowds, who included elderly couples and young parents carrying toddlers, chanted “Free political prisoners” and “This isn’t justice but dictatorship.”
“It makes you angry even when you don’t vote for independence because every time a disproportionate measure is taken, it only fuels independence,” said retired teacher Dolores, 66.
Puigdemont called in a statement broadcast on Catalan TV from an undisclosed location for the release of the ministers and said that the situation “is no longer an internal Spanish affair”.
“The international community, and especially the European community, must realise the danger these attitudes represent,” he said.
