700 injured in clashes during Catalan vote
The Washington Post
SABADELL, SPAIN — Just minutes after the first boisterous voters entered the polling station at an elementary school here on Sunday, dozens of National Police in riot gear smashed through the front window and began searching for the ballot boxes.
But the activists who organized this controversial vote on independence for the Catalan region were two steps ahead. As the police forced their way through shouting crowds into the polling station, the organizers spirited away the ballots and hid them in the classrooms amid coloring books and crayons.
An hour later, after police had driven away in their big black vans, under a hail of insults, the ballot boxes reemerged and the voting began again.
The pattern was repeated again and again across hundreds of polling stations Sunday in the Catalan region of northeast Spain, where a secessionist movement is pushing ahead with a disputed independence referendum that the central government in Madrid, backed by the courts, has called illegitimate and illegal.
By late afternoon, the regional authorities said 761 people had suffered minor injuries in brawls with police, who dragged protesters out of their way and whipped them with rubber batons. The officers fired scores of rubber bullets at crowds gathered at voting centers in Barcelona and other cities. Officials in Madrid said a dozen police officers had been injured.