Former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont has fled Spain despite a massive manhunt and a warrant for his arrest, his lawyer has said.
Gonzalo Boye said on Friday morning that the separatist leader is already “outside of the Spanish state” and that “between today and tomorrow” he will address the public.
The lawyer, who accompanied Puigdemont during his rally and televised escape on Thursday, told radio stations RAC1 and Catalunya Ràdio that his client “spoke to the citizens of Catalonia, saw that he had done his job, and left.”
Meanwhile, Jordi Turull, the general secretary of Puigdemont’s Junts party, told RAC1 that the ex-president had returned to his residence in Waterloo, Belgium, after spending the night in southern France. He added that he had had dinner with Puigdemont in Barcelona as early as Tuesday evening.
Puigdemont briefly ended seven years of self-imposed exile earlier this week to address a crowd in central Barcelona. He has been living in Waterloo since leading a failed, illegal independence attempt. A warrant for his arrest remains in place, but Catalan police appeared to make little effort to detain him.
Politicians branded the failure to arrest him a “national embarrassment” and an “unbearable humiliation” for Spain.
Catalonia’s regional police force, known as the Mossos d’Esquadra, has said two of its officers have been arrested for helping Puigdemont escape. One of them is the owner of the car in which the separatist leader is believed to have escaped.
There was heavy traffic across the region on Thursday as police stopped cars in search of the ex-president. However, the operation to detain him, known as “Operation Cage”, came to an end without success.
The Spanish government remained conspicuously silent on the case all of Thursday, but on Friday justice minister Félix Bolaños blamed the Mossos for Puigdemont’s escape.
“The entire operation to ensure that the Supreme Court order was complied with and that the arrest warrant for Mr Puigdemont was applied was the responsibility of the Mossos,” Bolaños said. “They are the competent police force.”
The incident overshadowed the investiture of Salvador Illa, the leader of the Catalan branch of Spain’s ruling Socialist Party, as the new president of Catalonia. In the end, Illa received enough votes in the regional parliament to be elected to the position, making him the region’s first leader from a non-separatist party since 2010.
