Madrid. After seven years living outside the country, former president Carles Puigdemont returned to Catalonia, gave a speech outside Parliament despite having a warrant for his arrest and after a police operation had been activated for his arrest, and disappeared again. Puigdemont’s presence in Catalonia was public, announced in advance and with dozens of cameras broadcasting his first political meeting live, and yet the former president was able to evade the controls and his whereabouts are still unknown. Some say he is returning to Belgium, where he has lived for seven years, and others that he is in the south of France.
Puigdemont still has an arrest warrant against him for an alleged crime of embezzlement, which according to the Spanish judges of the Supreme Court does not fall under the general amnesty law approved during this legislature and thanks to which he was exonerated from the rest of the cases opened against him, including those of the crimes of sedition and public disobedience. Hence, the former Catalan president was aware that his return to Barcelona would also entail a police operation for his arrest, but even so he announced several days in advance that he would be in Barcelona to participate in the investiture debate of the socialist Salvador Illa.
On his return to Catalonia, Puigdemont was greeted by around a thousand people at a brief rally near the Ciutadella park, where the regional parliament is located. There he gave a short speech and then quickly left the stage, hiding behind a white wall with an exit door and suddenly he was no longer there, having disappeared into the crowd.
After his disappearance, the Catalan regional police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, who were in charge of carrying out the court order for his arrest, activated for four hours what they called “Operation Cage”, which aimed to locate and arrest the former president. But it was useless. The only concrete result of the operation was the location of the vehicle in which he fled, which belonged to a Catalan regional police officer, who was subsequently arrested.
In addition, 22 people were slightly injured during the rally and subsequent disbanding of Puigdemont supporters outside Parliament. Puigdemont’s manoeuvre was also intended to prevent the formalisation of the government pact between the Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSC) and ERC, in order to push forward the investiture of the socialist Illa, who will become the third socialist leader to preside over the Generalitat since the restoration of democracy, after Pasquall Maragall and José Montilla.
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– 2024-08-13 10:47:20
