This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Fears of an escalation in Catalonia’s “yellow ribbon war” are growing after a group of about 80 masked vigilantes dressed in white boiler suits removed hundreds of the pro-independence symbols from a small town in the north of the region in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

A woman had her nose broken in Barcelona after a man punched her in the face last week because her children were removing ribbons from park railings. He then shouted at the woman, a Russian resident, to “go back where you came from”. Police have arrested her aggressor on charges of committing a hate crime.

Independence sympathisers started wearing yellow lapel ribbons after Spain jailed a number of Catalan political leaders for their role in last October’s illegal declaration of independence.

Supporters soon started spray-painting yellow symbols in the street and on buildings, and tying thousands of ribbons to railings and public buildings. They also planted hundreds of yellow crosses on beaches and in public squares.

The majority of Catalans, whatever their political sympathies, oppose the jailing of the politicians, but the proliferation of yellow ribbons is seen by many as the colonisation by a political faction of what they believe should be neutral public space.

The Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalan police force, said earlier this month that it had noted the names of 14 people seen removing ribbons in the southern Catalan city of Tarragona. Officers have not intervened to prevent anyone from putting them there.

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Inés Arrimadas, the leader of the rightwing Citizens party in Catalonia, accused the the region’s president, Quim Torra, of using the police as a political force.

“The police identify people who remove the ribbons but not those who put them there,” Arrimadas said, complaining that the police were taking action only against those who were trying clean up public space, not those who were occupying it.

Torra defended the police, saying: “They have done the right thing and any police force would have done the same, faced with a group armed with knives operating under the cover of darkness.”

María José Segarra, the attorney general, said it “is not a crime to either remove or put up” yellow ribbons and that it was a question of freedom of expression.

The latest incident, in which an organised group opposed to independence drove 60 miles (100km) from Cabrera de Mar to the strongly secessionist town of La Bisbal d’Empordà in order to remove the symbols, marks a significant escalation in the conflict.

Later on Wednesday Arrimadas and Citizens party leader Albert Rivera were seen cutting ribbons in Alella, just north of Barcelona.

