Fugitive Catalan separatist leader Carles Puigdemont said on Friday he had left Spain for Belgium after giving a brief address to supporters in Barcelona, rekindling a row over his evasion from arrest.
“Today I am in Waterloo after some very difficult days,” he wrote in Catalan on X (formerly Twitter), referring to the Belgian city where he has spent most of the last seven years.
Puigdemont, who fled abroad after leading Catalonia’s failed independence bid in 2017, returned to Spain on Thursday in defiance of an arrest warrant.
He delivered a speech to thousands of people gathered at the Catalan regional parliament in Barcelona and then left.
The 61-year-old was expected to try to enter the Parliament building to vote to select a new leader for the Northeast region. But instead he disappeared into the crowd.
His lawyer, Gonzalo Boye, and Josep Turull, the secretary general of Puigdemont’s hardline separatist Jexcat party, told Catalan radio on Friday that he had returned to Belgium.
But Eduard Saillant, the head of Catalonia’s regional police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, said on Friday that he had not ruled out the possibility that Puigdemont could still be in Barcelona.
Police search
Catalonia’s regional police launched a search for Puigdemont following his appearance on Thursday, and in a statement issued after he appeared insisted he had not been involved in any collusion.
The police force said officers had planned to arrest him “at the most opportune moment, so as not to cause public disorder.”
Two officers were arrested on Thursday, including one who owned the car he used to flee the scene. They are still accused of helping Puigdemont after being released a few hours later.
A third officer had been arrested in connection with the incident, the force told AFP on Friday.
Pablo Llarena, the Supreme Court judge who issued the arrest warrant for Puigdemont, on Friday sought the names of officials who approved the operation to arrest Puigdemont.
According to court documents, he also wanted to know the names of those “who were tasked with its implementation or operational deployment.”
Salant said his troops were ready to arrest Puigdemont near the regional parliament, but he did not go there as expected.
“The events happened very quickly”, he said, adding that Puigdemont was “surrounded by a crowd of people and officers” whose aim was “to obstruct police actions”.
Puigdemont led the regional government in 2017, when a referendum on independence was held despite a court ban.
The short-lived declaration of independence sparked the worst political crisis in Spain since the country’s return to democracy following the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975.
Puigdemont fled Spain shortly after his failed independence bid to avoid prosecution, and has since lived in Belgium and more recently in France.
While Spain’s parliament passed an amnesty law in May for those involved in the secession attempt, the Supreme Court ruled on July 1 that the measure would not fully apply to Puigdemont.
‘Inexplicable’
Puigdemont’s latest escape has sparked political recrimination.
Alberto Nunez Feijoo, head of Spain’s main opposition Popular Party, said the interior and defence ministers should be sacked for “police negligence” that allowed Puigdemont to escape arrest.
“What happened yesterday is unspeakable and cannot be left unpunished,” he wrote on the social network X.
But Justice Minister Felix Bolaños said the operation to arrest Puigdemont “was the responsibility of the Mossos”, whose job was to enforce court orders in Catalonia.
“In Spain the law must be respected and court orders must be obeyed,” the minister said.
Catalan parliament on Thursday elected Salvador Illa of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialist Party as Catalonia’s first prime minister from outside the pro-independence movement since 2010.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
