Further Catalan protests erupted today after a night of furious clashes with riot police over the conviction of separatist leaders.
Authorities said that three people were arrested and more than 170 others injured, including 40 police officers, during clashes that continued into the early hours of the morning at Barcelona’s airport and elsewhere across the northeastern Spanish region.
Blockades were reinstated on regional roads and railway lines on Tuesday, while at the European Union headquarters in Brussels demonstrators also took to the streets.
Spain’s airport operator, Aena, said that more than 1,000 flights were scheduled to operate normally in Barcelona, with six flights cancelled compared to 110 on Monday.
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People, waving Estelada pro Catalonia independence flags, march during a protest in Brussels on Tuesday
Protesters clash with Spanish riot policemen outside El Prat airport in Barcelona on Monday
Last night thousands of passengers were stranded at the airport, with many forced to walk with their luggage on roads and across fields.
The protesters were responding to an online campaign by Tsunami Democratic, a loose, leaderless grassroots group that uses encrypted messaging apps to call for peaceful disobedience.
Spain’s caretaker interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, said that authorities were investigating the group.
In a landmark ruling on Monday, Spain’s Supreme Court acquitted the Catalan politicians and activists from the more serious crime of rebellion for pushing ahead with a banned referendum on October 1 2017, and declaring independence based on its results.
But judges found nine of them guilty of sedition and handed down prison terms of nine to 13 years.
Four of them were additionally convicted of misuse of public funds and three were fined for disobedience.
The court also barred all of them from holding public office.
Riot police carry their shields as the units walk past a barricade on fire during a demonstration at El Prat airport as clashes erupted on Monday evening
Ousted former Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont takes part in a protest with Catalan supporters in Brussels
That has an immediate impact in the upcoming November 10 election because six of them were planning to run as candidates to Spain’s parliament.
The verdict is likely to be a central issue before the vote and politics for years to come, with very different views in Madrid and Catalonia already emerging hours after it was issued.
While Spain’s caretaker prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, called for beginning a ‘new phase’ and urged Catalan separatists to abide by the law, the ruling invigorated the Catalan independence movement, with many of its leaders making new calls to work toward effective secession or repeating the slogan ‘we will do it again’.
‘We have to continue defending the right of Catalonia to self-determination,’ the regional president, Quim Torra, told foreign reporters in Barcelona on Tuesday.
‘A referendum is the most positive solution for solving this situation.’
His regional minister for foreign action, Alfred Bosch, urged the Spanish prime minister to change his attitude.
‘We don’t see any proposal, we only see 100 years of prison, exile and repression,’ Mr Bosch said.
The caretaker Spanish foreign minister, Josep Borrell, soon due to become the European Union’s top diplomat, said the sentence wasn’t resolving the underlying political problems that only dialogue ‘in the framework of the Constitution’ could.
Demonstrators blocked a corridor inside El Prat Airport in Barcelona with luggage trolleys after nine separatist leaders were jailed on Monday over a failed independence bid
Spain’s constitutional law says that the country is indivisible.
‘Yesterday, today and tomorrow it is and remains a political problem that has to be solved,’ Mr Borrell told foreign reporters, adding that Catalan separatists shouldn’t ignore Catalans like him who are against independence.
‘When one excludes part of the population because they don’t think like one, and only considers as the people those who think like one, this is a totalitarian attitude,’ he said.
The regional emergency service, SEM, said that 131 people had been treated overnight for injuries, most of them at the airport.
Two dozen people were taken to hospitals, one with serious eye damage.