BARCELONA: Barcelona’s mayor has asked for reassurances that municipal staff would not face legal action or lose their jobs if they helped to organize an Oct. 1 referendum on Catalonia seceding from Spain.
However, some of the region’s nearly 1,000 mayors have already said they would go ahead with the vote, despite it being declared illegal by Madrid.
Having originally offered to allow premises across the city to be used as polling stations, Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau has asked the Catalan government for further reassurances that civil servants involved would be protected, her office said.
“We support the right to participate and protest completely but we will repeat what we have said many times before: We will not put at risk institutions or civil servants,” Barcelona’s Deputy Mayor Gerardo Pisarello said on Friday.
Catalonia’s Parliament voted on Wednesday to hold an independence referendum on Oct. 1, setting up a clash with the Spanish government that has vowed to stop what it says would be an illegal vote.
Polls in the northeastern region show support for self-rule waning. But the majority of Catalans do want the opportunity to vote on whether to split from Spain.
As of Friday night, 674 of Catalonia’s 948 municipal districts had informed the government of their intention to allow city spaces to be used for the vote, according to the Municipal Association for Independence (AMI).
In a video posted on Twitter, the mayor of the Cerdanyola municipality tore in half a letter from the Constitutional Court warning of the legal repercussions of participating in the referendum to applause from the crowd watching.
Pro-independence groups protested on Friday outside the offices of several mayors across Catalonia who announced they would not allow municipal spaces to be used for the vote.
On Saturday, police searched the offices of a weekly newspaper in the town of Valls in search of ballot papers, according to newspaper La Vanguardia. On Friday, the Civil Guard police searched a printing company near Tarragona, reportedly in search of materials to be used in the independence vote.
Spain’s Civil Guard police was unavailable for comment but a court statement said the searches were related to charges brought by the public prosecutor in relation to the referendum.
Catalan independence vote divides region’s mayors
Catalan independence vote divides region’s mayors
Islamist militants show ‘unprecedented coordination’ in Burkina Faso attacks
- The assaults were on several towns in the north and east including Bilanga, Titao, Tandjari and Nare
- The operations targeted military detachments, civilian convoys and market areas
DAKAR: Islamist militants have killed dozens of soldiers and civilians and overrun an army detachment over the past week in coordinated attacks across multiple regions of Burkina Faso, according to internal reports by two diplomatic missions reviewed by Reuters.
The operations by Al Qaeda–linked Jama’at Nusrat Al-Islam wal-Muslimin show the JNIM is increasingly able to mobilize across large swathes of territory at one time, said the reports, which described a list of locations and places that came under assault.
Burkina Faso’s military rulers seized power in a coup in 2022, promising to improve security. But militants’ attacks have increased in the West African country as state forces battle an insurgency that has spread across the Sahel from Mali.
The assaults were on several towns in the north and east including Bilanga, Titao, Tandjari and Nare, the diplomatic reports said. One also described an assault in the eastern city of Fada N’Gourma and flagged another in the northern Ouahigouya area.
“These attacks, which were almost simultaneous and spread across several provinces, demonstrate unprecedented coordination between militants and the junta’s inability to contain the assaults,” said one of the internal reports, which put the death toll at more than 180.
The other gave no toll but said the incidents appeared coordinated and involved several hundred militants serving JNIM and possibly Daesh affiliates.
The operations targeted military detachments, civilian convoys and market areas, it said.
JNIM has said it killed scores of troops from the Burkinabe army in attacks in the past week, US-based SITE Intelligence Group said on Monday.
Burkina authorities did not respond to a request for comment on the assaults or casualty reports.
INJURED GHANAIANS RETURN HOME
In the northern town of Titao, militants attacked an army base and set a market on fire, the internal reports said.
Nearly 80 soldiers and pro-government militia members were killed, one said. The other said about 10 civilians were killed there.
The dead civilians included eight tomato traders, Ghana’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday.
SITE quoted a media unit for JNIM as saying the insurgents had seized military vehicles, guns and other possessions in the assaults. More than a decade of insurgencies in the Sahel has displaced millions and engendered economic collapse, with violence pushing further south toward West Africa’s coast.
JNIM claimed nearly 500 attacks in Burkina Faso in 2025 and nearly 300 in Mali, SITE’s director, Rita Katz, said in a social media post on LinkedIn.
