Outside the city center, groups of demonstrators cut off traffic on four different stretches of highways. Police also used batons to keep back a crowd of a few thousand who had gathered in front of the Spanish government’s representative in the city of Lleida.
German highway police stopped Puigdemont on Sunday morning near the A7 highway that leads into Germany from Denmark, police in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein said. German news agency dpa said that Puigdemont was taken to a prison in the northern town of Neumuenster. Dpa photos showed a van with tinted windows believed to be carrying Puigdemont as it arrived at the prison. Video footage also showed the same van leaving a police station in Schuby near the A7 highway.
State prosecutors in Schleswig said that Puigdemont will appear in court Monday in the northern German town to confirm his identity. It said in a statement that “the question of whether Mr. Puigdemont has to be taken into extradition custody will then have to be determined by the higher regional court in Schleswig.”
German state prosecutor Ralph Doepper told RTL Television that Puigdemont has been “provisionally detained. He has not been arrested.” “We are now examining the further procedure, i.e. tomorrow we will decide whether we will file a provisional application for detention with the competent district court, which could lead to extradition detention later on,” Doepper said.
A Spanish police official told The Associated Press under customary condition of anonymity that Spain’s National Center for Intelligence and police agents from its international cooperation division helped German police to locate Puigdemont.
A Spanish Supreme Court judge reactivated an international arrest warrant for Puigdemont on Friday when he was visiting Finland. Spain has also issued five warrants for other separatist who fled the country.
Ines Arrimadas, the leader of the pro-Spain Citizens party which has the most seats in Catalonia’s Parliament, said that the chaos on the streets was “of a society broken in two” by the secessionist movement.
Arrimadas said: “Puigdemont knew that fracturing Catalan society into two parts, spending public money on illegal activities, provoking a political and institutional crisis without precedents and confronting a 21st-century democracy of the European Union was going to have consequences.”
But the Catalan parliament speaker, the highest-ranking elected official in the region until it forms a government, made a televised address on Catalan public television to call for a united “democratic front” of political parties, labor unions and civil society organizations to respond to what he called “the thirst for revenge of the powers of the state.”
Speaker Roger Torrent accused Spain’s central authorities of “attacking the heart of democracy making a general cause against its political adversaries.” Miquel Coca, a business owner in Barcelona, likewise vowed that the secession push wouldn’t falter.
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