The former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont is to appear in court following his arrest in Germany, which triggered a wave of protests in Catalonia where thousands of separatists confronted police.



Puigdemont, who has been living in self-imposed exile in Brussels since October, was travelling in a car on the way from Finland to Belgium on Sunday when he was detained, having visited Finnish lawmakers in Helsinki.

German police arrested him after he crossed the border from Denmark, under a European arrest warrant reactivated on Friday by Spain, where he is wanted on charges of sedition, rebellion and misuse of public funds.

Puigdemont, who has been held in prison in the town of Neumünster since his arrest, will be brought before a German judge on Monday afternoon to confirm his identity and decide if he is to remain in custody. The state court in Schleswig-Holstein will rule at a later date on whether to put Puigdemont in formal pre-extradition custody on the basis of documents provided by Spain.

German government officials have stressed that the case is a matter for the judicial system, but declined to say on Monday whether the government could ultimately overrule a court decision.

The news of Puigdemont’s arrest sparked protests in Catalonia that turned violent, with six arrests and at least 98 people injured in Barcelona.

A crowd of several thousand people gathered outside the office of the European commission in the city chanting “no more repression” and “general strike”. They later made their way to demonstrate outside the German consulate.

While the main demonstration passed off peacefully, several hundred protesters tried to break through police cordons around the seat of the Spanish government in Barcelona. They were beaten back by baton charges.

A firefighter douses burning rubbish during clashes between riot police and demonstrators in Barcelona. Photograph: Lluis Gene/AFP/Getty Images

There were also demonstrations in all four of Catalonia’s provincial capitals and major roads were blocked by sit-down protests amid a growing sense that the era of peaceful pro-independence demonstrations is over, despite appeals from the main secessionist parties for calm.

Puigdemont had covered 808 miles (1,300km) of the 1,243-mile car journey from Helsinki to Brussels when he was stopped at 11.19am, apparently at a petrol station near Schuby on the A7 motorway, 31 miles into German territory, according to his lawyer, Jaume Alonso-Cuevillas.

According to German media reports, the arrest was made following a tip-off from Spain’s intelligence agency to German federal police’s Sirene bureau, part of a network of information-sharing units for national police in the Schengen area.

Profile Who is Carles Puigdemont? Show In a little over a decade, Carles Puigdemont has gone from obscurity to becoming the Spanish government’s bête noire and the pubic face of the Catalan independence movement.

A staunch and long-standing independence campaigner who has been the regional president of Catalonia since January 2016, Puigdemont was born to a family of bakers in the Catalan province of Girona in 1962. He studied Catalan philology at university before becoming a journalist on the Girona-based daily El Punt and helping to launch Catalonia Today, an English-language paper. He was elected in 2006 to the Catalan parliament as an MP for the Convergence and Union party representing the Girona region and five years later became the mayor of Girona. Puigdemont found himself thrust into the Catalan presidency in January 2016 after his predecessor, Artur Mas, stepped aside to facilitate the formation of a pro-independence coalition government.

Puigdemont could face up to 25 years in prison in Spain if convicted of charges of rebellion and sedition for organising an illegal referendum for Catalonia that led to a unilateral declaration of independence in October.

Spain had sent a request to the Finnish authorities to detain Puigdemont, who was on a visit to promote the Catalan independence cause. However, the request was written in Spanish and there was a delay while authorities in Madrid had it translated into English. In the meantime, Puigdemont left the country.



In a statement on Sunday, Puigdemont’s press officer said: “Carles Puigdemont has been detained in Germany as he crossed from Denmark en route to Belgium. He has been properly treated throughout and is right now in a police station. He was on his way to Belgium where he would be, as always, at the disposal of Belgian justice.”

Puigdemont was transferred to Neumünster prison in northern Schlewig-Holstein on Sunday afternoon. Citing “rumours within judicial circles”, the local newspaper Kieler Nachrichten reported that Puigdemont was considering applying for asylum in Germany. The paper added that the chances of an asylum application overriding the European arrest warrant were relatively slim.

According to the rules of the warrant, Germany has up to 60 days to decide whether to extradite him to Spain. If Puigdemont surrenders to be prosecuted, the decision must be made within 10 days.



The international warrant, originally issued in November, was rescinded in December amid Spanish concerns that Belgium would not extradite Puigdemont for the more serious charges against him as they are not on the Belgian statute books.



Were he to be extradited only on the lesser charge of misuse of public funds, he could be tried only for that offence.

Germany can extradite suspects only if the alleged offence is also punishable under German law. There is no such crime as rebellion under German law, but there is a crime of high treason, defined as using force or the threat of force to undermine the constitutional order.

The Catalan unilateral declaration of independence was entirely peaceful, if unlawful, although Spanish authorities may argue there was an implicit threat of force. The crime of sedition was dropped from German law in the 1970s.

Arrest warrants were also reactivated on Friday for Lluís Puig, Meritxell Serret and Toni Comín, who are all in Belgium, and Clara Ponsatí, who is in Scotland teaching at the University of St Andrews. Authorities in Scotland confirmed they had received the warrant, and Ponsatí was said to be negotiating to turn herself in to police.

Warrants were also issued for the arrest of Marta Rovira, the secretary general of the secessionist Republican Left party, and Anna Gabriel, of the radical Popular Unity Candidacy, both of whom have sought refuge in Switzerland.

On Friday, a Spanish supreme court judge, Pablo Llaren, remanded in custody Jordi Turull, the third and latest candidate for the vacant Catalan presidency, and four others, among them a former speaker of the Catalan parliament. They join Oriol Junqueras, leader of Republican Left, and three others already held on remand in Madrid jails.