Police fire rubber bullets

Several people were wounded when Spanish riot police last night fired rubber projectiles at protesters outside a Barcelona polling station during Catalonia’s disputed independence referendum.

The officers fired the projectiles while trying to clear protesters who were trying to impede National Police cars from leaving after police confiscated ballot boxes from the voting centre.

An AP photographer witnessed how several people had been injured during the scuffles outside Barcelona’s Rius i Taule school, where some voters had cast ballots before police arrived.

Manuel Conedeminas, a 48-year-old IT manager who tried to block police from driving away with the ballot boxes, said agents had kicked them before using their batons and firing the projectiles, which were ball-shaped.

Catalans formed queues last night NZT at designed polling stations in Barcelona schools to vote in the referendum in defiance of the Spanish Government’s attempts to prevent the vote. But police forcefully removed a few hundred would-be voters from one polling station.

The referendum has been declared illegal by Spain’s central Government and it was unclear if voting stations would be allowed to open and stay open.

The referendum has thrown the country into its worst constitutional crisis in decades and raised fears of street violence as a test of will between Madrid and Barcelona plays out.

— AP, Reuters