Puigdemont arrest soon
SEDITION AND REBELLION: SPANISH JUDGE ISSUES WARRANT FOR ‘REBEL’
Eight ministers detained pending possible court case.
ASpanish judge yesterday issued an arrest warrant for Catalonia’s deposed leader Carles Puigdemont over his region’s contested independence drive, in a move likely to further escalate tensions in Spain’s worst political crisis in decades.
The European arrest warrant was issued after a large chunk of Puigdemont’s government was thrown behind bars pending probes in Madrid into their role in Catalonia’s push for secession.
Puigdemont, dismissed last week as Catalan president by the Spanish government and who has since been holed up in Belgium, had failed to show up at a Thursday court hearing in Madrid.
Judge Carmen Lamela, who on Thursday had Puigdemont’s deputy Oriol Junqueras and seven other deposed regional ministers detained pending a potential trial
for alleged sedition, rebellion and misuse of public funds, issued the warrant late yesterday, a judicial source in Madrid said.
Puigdemont’s Belgian lawyer, Paul Bekaert, had earlier told Flemish television channel VRT that he expected the Spanish judiciary would then send an extradition request to Belgian federal prosecutors, adding that his client would appeal if a Belgian judge approved the request.
As television footage showed
images of police vans with flashing blue lights taking Puigdemont’s 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 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 cellphones 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”.
Catalan demands for independence date back centuries but have surged in recent years due to a difficult economic situation compounded by corruption. –