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Spain's police reinforcements in Catalonia are on their way home. The Spanish Interior Ministry is gradually withdrawing the extra National Police and Civil Guard agents who arrived in Catalonia from around Spain before the referendum of 1st October. A staggered farewell began on Boxing Day and by Saturday 30th, all of the specially-deployed officers will have left, reducing the presence of these two police forces to their previous levels. 

Before the New Year is rung in, then, the two ships docked in Barcelona as accommodation for many of the police officers will weigh anchor, bringing to an end the so-called 'Operation Copernicus', which saw an unprecedented concentration of thousands of extra Spanish police agents in Catalonia in order to act against the Catalan independence referendum and its consequences - although many precise details of their mission are unknown as they have been classified by Spain as a state secret.

The best known of the vessels used in the operation, the ferry Moby Dada, which came to be known popularly as the Piolín boat - the Tweety-Pie boat, a reference to the classic cartoon figure which was painted on its hull - left the port of Barcelona on December 16th; now the remaining two passenger ships, the GNV Azzurra and the Rhapsody, berthed in the Catalan capital, are to set sail.

Other police officers accommodated in hotels and military installations are also returning to their points of origin, leaving the two Spanish forces, the National Police and Civil Guard at their usual modest levels in Catalonia, where the majority of police functions are carried out by the Catalan Mossos d'Esquadra police force along with local municipal police.

Since the start of the operation three months ago, when unofficial estimates of the extra police deployed went close to 20,000 agents, the Spanish interior ministry has several times extended the duration of the deployment for a proportion of these extra agents, so that some of the officers were kept at the ready during the Catalan election campaign and until after the vote itself on 21st December.

The controversial presence of the forces did not finish without one last minor scandal, this one over the food served to the agents for their Christmas Eve dinner, which ended with the opening of an inquiry by Juan Ignacio Zoido's ministry. An officer of the National Police tweeted a photo of the repast offered to the police forces on 24th December.

Translation: This is the Christmas Eve dinner given to the police officers in Barcelona on board the ship. Does this seem normal or does it seem as disgraceful to you as it does to me? For God's sake, what a Christmas Eve they are having. - Subinspector Alfredo Perdiguero.