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Bloomberg
The Spanish government is tightening its control over the regional police in Catalonia after evidence emerged that the Catalans’ 17,000-strong force may not be fully committed to helping quash an illegal independence referendum planned for October 1.
Prosecutors on Saturday ordered a unit of the central government’s Interior Ministry to coordinate the operations of the Civil Guard, the National Police and the local Mossos d’Esquadra—as the Catalan police department is known—according to a press officer for the central government in Madrid. The decision was being discussed in a meeting in Barcelona between the top prosecutor in Catalonia and the heads of the police corps, he said.
The development came hours after Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s government decided to send more reinforcements to help the Mossos control street demonstrations and enforce a court order to halt the referendum that was conceived by Catalonia’s defiant regional administration. A spokesman for the Catalan government didn’t provide immediate comment.
Officials in Madrid have quietly hired cruise ships to moor in the Port of Barcelona as temporary housing as they amass what El Correo newspaper said may be more than 16,000 riot police and other security officers before the planned poll.
The decision on police control may face opposition. Catalan police chief Josep Lluis Trapero plans to present allegations against the measure, saying that it goes too far, Catalan regional government-owned Catalunya Radio reported.
Carles Puigdemont, Catalonia’s president, called the vote in an attempt to push the secession movement forward after decades of political and legal fights over the region’s traditions and language. Since Rajoy took office in 2011, he’s been embroiled in persistent clashes with separatists seeking to foment a backlash against Madrid. Catalonia is home to about 7.5 million people, or 16 percent of the population, but accounts for a fifth of the economy, on par with Portugal and Finland.
About 40,000 people took to the streets of Barcelona to protest Rajoy’s clampdown using bused-in officers from the national Civil Guard who searched local-government
offices and arrested at least 14 officials. Members of the Catalan National Assembly, a group of separatist activists, set up a security cordon outside the economy department’s headquarters, trapping a Civil Guard squad inside as demonstrators vandalised their vehicles. Spanish prosecutors opened a probe into the events for possible charges of sedition.