MADRID: Fugitive Catalan separatist leader Carles Puigdemont on Saturday said he had had no intention of handing himself in to authorities during a brief visit to Spain earlier this week.
Puigdemont, who fled abroad after leading a failed 2017 independence bid for Catalonia, defied an arrest warrant to return to Spain on Thursday.
He delivered a speech to thousands gathered outside the Catalan regional parliament in Barcelona before slipping away.
“I never had any intention of handing myself in to a judicial authority that is neither competent to persecute us... nor to render justice, but is motivated by political objectives,” Puigdemont said in a video published on social media site X.
On Friday, Puigdemont had revealed he was back in Belgium, where he has lived in exile for the last seven years.
The 61-year-old had been hoping to enter the Catalan regional parliament building to take part in a vote to pick a new leader for the wealthy northeastern region.
Instead, he disappeared into the crowd as the Catalan regional police force launched a manhunt.
Speaking from his home in Waterloo, close to the Belgian capital, Puigdemont said he had been hoping to “enter parliament to take part in the session and exercise my right to speak and to vote.”
But a heavy police presence at the park near parliament where he gave a speech had convinced him to abandon those plans to avoid “certain arrest.”
He said that he had thus decided to flee “in a context of repression and total encirclement” so that he could return home.
The leader of the hard-line Catalan nationalist JxCAT party said he had been aware of the “risks” and “huge costs of failure” had he tried to enter the parliament building.
He accused the Spanish state of not acting democratically and the supreme court of ignoring laws approved by parliament.
Puigdemont led the regional government in 2017 when it carried out an independence referendum despite a court ban.
A short-lived declaration of independence sparked Spain’s worst political crisis since the country returned to democracy following the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975.
Puigdemont fled Spain shortly after the failed independence bid to avoid prosecution and has since lived in Belgium and more recently France.
While Spain’s parliament passed an amnesty law in May for those involved in the secession bid, the supreme court ruled on July 1 that the measure would not fully apply to Puigdemont.
Three police officers have been arrested for allegedly helping Puigdemont flee while Catalonia’s regional police has denied colluding with him.
Fugitive Catalan separatist leader says would not surrender
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Fugitive Catalan separatist leader says would not surrender
- “I never had any intention of handing myself in to a judicial authority that is neither competent to persecute us... nor to render justice,” Puigdemont said
- On Friday, Puigdemont had revealed he was back in Belgium, where he has lived in exile for the last seven years
More than 9,000 flights canceled as major winter storm bears down across much of US
- “Dangerously cold temperatures and wind chills are spreading into the area and will remain in place into Monday,” the agency said on X
DALLAS: More than 9,000 flights across the US set to take off over the weekend have been canceled as a major storm expected to wreak havoc across much of the country threatens to knock out power for days and snarl major roadways.
Roughly 140 million people were under a winter storm warning from New Mexico to New England.
The National Weather Service forecast warns of widespread heavy snow and a band of catastrophic ice stretching from east Texas to North Carolina.
Forecasters say damage, especially in areas pounded by ice, could rival that of a hurricane.
Ice and sleet that hit northern Texas overnight were moving toward the central part of the state on Saturday, the National Weather Service in Fort Worth said.
“Dangerously cold temperatures and wind chills are spreading into the area and will remain in place into Monday,” the agency said on X.
Low temperatures will be mostly in the single digits for the next few nights, with wind chills as low as minus 24 Celsius.
About 68,000 power outages were reported across the country at 8 a.m. ET, about 27,600 of them in Texas. Snow and sleet continued to fall in Oklahoma.
After sweeping through the South, the storm was expected to move into the Northeast, dumping about a foot of snow from Washington through New York and Boston, the weather service predicted.
Temperatures reached minus 34 C just before dawn in rural Lewis County and other parts of upstate New York after days of heavy snow.
Governors in more than a dozen states sounded the alarm about the turbulent weather ahead, declaring emergencies or urging people to stay home.
