Barcelona (AFP)
About twenty people were injured Wednesday in Barcelona during clashes between the police and hundreds of freelancers outside the Camp Nou where the Clasico took place between Barça and Real Madrid, according to the emergency services.
The clashes erupted suddenly in a street near the stadium between the demonstrators raising independence flags and the police arrived in dozens of vans, an AFP journalist noted.
After a police charge, the demonstrators, most of them young and some with masked faces, entrenched themselves behind a barricade of dumpsters, which they set on fire, then sprinkled the police with stones and bottles.
Twenty-one people received care and six of them were hospitalized, said emergency services.
Two protesters were arrested, said a police spokesman.
Calm returned when the crowd started to leave Camp Nou, where the match ended in a 0-0 draw.
These are the first notable violent incidents in Barcelona since the riots that erupted in Catalonia after the conviction on October 14 of nine pro-independence leaders to prison terms for the 2017 secession attempt.
Before the match, hundreds of Catalan separatist demonstrators had cut traffic at the gates of the FC Barcelona stadium, in a rather festive atmosphere, between songs and slogans.
In the stadium itself, between the end of the hymn and the kick-off of the game, thousands of blue banners were brandished with cries of "Llibertat" (freedom, in Catalan).
It was the action planned by the independence platform Tsunami Democratique, which distributed these blue banners as of Wednesday afternoon during the demonstrations which gathered nearly 5,000 sympathizers around the stadium according to the police.
The banners displayed the slogan of the platform: "#SpainSitAndTalk", (Spain, sit down and dialogue, in English), the phrase code separatists to demand that Madrid accepts an independence referendum.
© 2019 AFP