Fugitive Catalan secessionist leader Carles Puigdemont has allegedly somehow wiggled out of Spain and made it back to Belgium, leadership of his party announced on Friday following a brief public appearance then a massive manhunt in Barcelona the previous day, AFP reports.
Catalonian cops aren’t so sure and think it might just be a feint. “Until we have proof that he is outside the jurisdiction of the Mossos d’Esquadra, we will continue to look for him,” Eduard Sallent, head of Catalonia’s regional police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, told reporters on Friday.
Puigdemont, leader of the Catalan nationalist Junts per Catalunya party, had been hiding in Brussels for the last seven years after he fled charges over a failed 2017 independence referendum for the eastern region, encompassing 16 percent of the country’s population, about 7 percent of its total area, and kicked in 20 percent of national GDP last year. The sudden reappearance in Barcelona on Thursday was seen as a bid to disrupt the investiture of Socialist former Spanish health minister Salvador Illa as the new Catalan president, set for this afternoon local time. Illa is not on team rebel it appeared Pudgy’s goal was to cast the frenemy pro-independence party Catalan Republican Left (ERC), as collaborators with Madrid because of their agreement to support Illa’s investiture.