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MADRID (Reuters) - The former head of Catalonia’s regional government Carles Puigdemont said on Monday that the prison sentences for the separatist leaders on trial for a failed 2017 independence bid were an “atrocity.”

“It is time to react ... for the future of our sons and daughters. For democracy. For Europe. For Catalonia,” he wrote on Twitter.

Puigdemont was the head of the Spanish region at the time of the independence bid but was not part of this trial because he fled to Belgium, where he now lives in self-imposed exile.