Violent clashes in Barcelona after Catalan leader held in Germany
SPAIN: At least 17 people were injured yesterday in Barcelona when the police fired blanks into the air and clashed with tens of thousands of demonstrators protesting against the arrest of Catalonia’s deposed leader.
Carles Puigdemont, who was detained in Germany by officers using a European arrest warrant, is wanted in Spain on charges of rebellion and other offences.
A Catalan professor teaching economics at the University of St Andrews, who is being sought on a similar arrest warrant, was preparing to hand herself in to the Scottish police yesterday.
Clara Ponsati, 61, a former minister in the pro-independence Catalan government, fled Spain to Belgium with Puigdemont and three other politicians days after a failed secession declaration in October.
Ponsati returned to Scotland this month after five months in Belgium to resume her job as a lecturer in economics. She recently admitted being worried about the possibility of facing an extradition hearing and being sent back to Spain for trial.
In Barcelona the separatist Popular Unity Candidacy party called for a ‘‘Catalan Spring’’ of resistance against the Spanish state over the ‘‘illegal detention of our president’’. ‘‘Let’s burn injustice,’’ the party urged supporters.
Riot police officers wielding batons struggled to push back a crowd advancing on the office of the Spanish government’s representative in Catalonia.
Protesters chanted ‘‘Puigdemont our president’’ and ‘‘Freedom for the political prisoners’’, as they made their way to the offices of the European Commission in the Catalan capital, where they chanted: ‘‘This Europe is shameful!’’ They were also asked to march to the German consulate.
The German police arrested Puigdemont as he was returning from Finland, where he visited the national parliament last week. Agents from the Centre for National Intelligence, the Spanish secret service, are understood to have followed the Catalan leader after he arrived in Finland and worked with the German police to co-ordinate the arrest.
He was returning to Belgium, where he has been in exile since a failed declaration of independence last October.
The German police said that Puigdemont, 55, had been arrested in the northern state of SchleswigHolstein and was being held in prison near Hamburg. He is to appear in court in Schleswig today.
On Saturday a Spanish supreme court judge issued international arrest warrants against Puigdemont and five other fugitive Catalan leaders who have been charged with rebellion and could face up to 30 years in prison. In total Judge Pablo Llarena charged 13 separatist politicians and activists with rebellion in a legal clampdown unprecedented in modern Spain.
‘‘President Puigdemont was detained in Germany when he was crossing the border with Denmark,’’ a spokesman for the Catalan leader said. ‘‘He is in a police station and his legal defence has been activated. The president was going to Belgium to put himself at the disposal of Belgian justice.’’
If Puigdemont faces extradition proceedings in Germany his lawyers will try to argue there is no equivalent charge to rebellion under German law.
Extradition through the European arrest warrant in most cases requires ‘‘double criminality’’, meaning the crimes must exist in the statutes of both countries.
Reports in the Spanish media yesterday said the closest charge to rebellion under the German criminal code was one of high treason. It is defined as an effort ‘‘to undermine the continued existence of the Federal Republic of Germany’’.
Spain had originally asked for Puigdemont’s extradition from Belgium after he moved there.
In December Llarena dropped an international arrest warrant against Puigdemont and four other renegade ministers who fled to Brussels after becoming aware of a discrepancy between Belgian and Spanish law. –