Spain seeks answers after Puigdemont evades arrest

BARCELONA

Fugitive Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont has left Spain for Belgium after briefly addressing supporters in Barcelona, his party said Friday, raising questions over how he was able to evade arrest again.

Puigdemont, who fled abroad after leading a failed 2017 independence bid for Catalonia, defied a pending arrest warrant to return to Spain on Thursday and delivered a speech to thousands gathered at the Catalan regional parliament in Barcelona before vanishing.

The 61-year-old had been expected to try to enter the parliament building for a debate and vote to pick a new leader for the wealthy northeastern region, but instead disappeared into the crowd.

"He is on his way back to Waterloo," the secretary general of Puigdemont's hardline separatist party JxCAT, Josep Turull, told Catalan radio in a reference to the Belgian city where he has spent most of the past seven years.

Puigdemont's lawyer, Gonzalo Boye, told Catalan radio earlier on Friday that his client had fled abroad again, without giving details. Puigdemont will speak "today or tomorrow," he added.

But Eduard Sallent, the head of Catalonia's regional police force, the Mossos d'Esquadra, said he did not "rule out" that Puigdemont was still in Barcelona.

"Until we have proof that he is outside the jurisdiction of the Mossos d'Esquadra, we will continue to look for him," he told a Barcelona news conference.

Catalonia's regional police said Thursday it had arrested two officers, including one who owned the car used by Puigdemont to leave the scene.

The force, which has launched a manhunt for Puigdemont, denied there had been any collusion and insisted officers had planned to arrest him "at the most opportune time so as not to generate public disorder".

  'Unfolded very quickly' 

Supreme Court Judge Pablo Llarena, who had issued the arrest warrant for Puigdemont, on Friday requested answers specifically from the police force and the interior ministry.

He demanded the names of the officers who designed and approved the operation to arrest Puigdemont, as well as "those who have been entrusted with its execution or operational deployment," according to a court document.

Sallent said his force had everything ready to arrest Puigdemont near the regional parliament but he did not end up going there as had been expected.

"The events unfolded very quickly," he said, adding Puigdemont was "surrounded by a crowd of people and authorities" with the "aim of obstructing the action of the police".

Puigdemont led the regional government in 2017, when it pushed ahead with an independence referendum despite a court ban, followed by a short-lived declaration of independence that sparked Spain's worst political crisis since the country returned to democracy following the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975.

He fled Spain shortly after the failed independence bid to avoid prosecution and has since lived in Belgium and more recently France.

While Spain's parliament passed an amnesty law in May for those involved in the secession bid, the Supreme Court ruled on July 1 that the measure would not fully apply to him.

 'Unspeakable' 

Puigdemont's latest escape has brought political recriminations,

The head of Spain's main opposition Popular Party, Alberto Nunez Feijoo, said the country's interior and defence ministers should be dismissed for the "police negligence" that allowed Puigdemont to evade arrest.

"What happened yesterday is unspeakable and cannot go unpunished," he wrote on social network X.

But Justice Minister Felix Bolanos said on Friday the operation to arrest Puigdemont "was the responsibility of the Mossos", whose job it was to enforce court orders in Catalonia.

"In Spain the law must be respected and court orders must be complied with," the minister said.

Catalonia's parliament on Thursday elected Salvador Illa of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez's Socialists as Catalonia's first head not from the pro-independence movement since 2010.