schema:articleBody
| - A Spanish court has acquitted the former head of Catalonia's police force after a trial where he was accused of "sedition" over the province's attempt to secede from Madrid in 2017, a judicial source told AFP Tuesday. Madrid judges "acquitted all the defendants", Josep Lluis Trapero and three other senior Catalan officials, the source said. Prosecutors had called for Trapero to receive a 10-year jail sentence for his alleged crime. They said the regional police was "totally passive" when Spanish courts ordered a halt to the independence referendum organised on October 1, 2017 by the separatist government in Barcelona. But judges found that it was "unclear that (the defendants) were part of the plan to organise the referendum", the judicial source said. During the trial, Trapero said that he "cannot accept that people talk about passiveness" by the Catalan Mossos d'Esquadra police force. He and his men had "always done what (the courts) ordered us to do," he added. In the dock alongside Trapero were two senior officials from the police and the Catalan interior ministry, Pere Soler and Cesar Puig, as well as police officer Teresa Laplana. The 2017 independence vote was fraught with violence by security forces under the control of the national government. Less than a month later, the Catalan parliament made a declaration of independence that ultimately failed, but provoked Spain's worst political crisis since the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975. emi/tgb/pvh
|