Catalan police are not likely to need much time to identify the people who carried out a denigrating poster campaign against Barcelona political family, the Maragalls, and the illness that former Catalan president Pasqual Maragall suffers from, Alzheimer's. With brother Ernest Maragall a candidate for the mayoralty of Barcelona in May, his party, Catalan Republican Left (ERC), has said that the Mossos d'Esquadra police have opened an investigation - which the Mossos confirm although they have done so ex-oficio since ERC has not yet laid a complaint. In fact, the Catalan police have already had access to security camera footage that shows the people who pasted up the posters and, as ElNacional.cat has learned, they are easily identifiable, since they were working with their faces uncovered.
The postering campaign, for which no one has yet claimed responsibility, is not only in bad taste, it is also illegal. The Catalan police believe that the posters could be a hate crime against people with Alzheimer's disease, and thus, under the law, they do not need a complaint from any affected person to begin an investigation. The Mossos d'Esquadra have images of areas close to the ERC headquarters where the posters with photographs of Ernest Maragall and his brother Pasqual, diagnosed years ago with this neurodegenerative disease, were hung. The slogan on the poster translates to, "Alzheimer's, get out of Barcelona", with the photograph of the ERC candidate in the foreground and that of the former Catalan president behind him.
Hate crime against Alzheimer's patients
With the images from the security cameras, the Mossos d'Esquadra team investigating are convinced that they will soon learn the names of those who pasted up the posters that have caused irritation in political circles in the Catalan capital, with the municipal elections three months away.
When the Mossos are able to identify them, a report will be sent to the duty court so that a judge will then decide how to proceed. If in the end the people who put up the posters can be accused and convicted of a hate crime, and no one from ERC or the Maragall family files a complaint, they will face jail sentences of between 1 and 4 years.
Shows of support for the Maragalls
At the same time, the Barcelona City Council yesterday ordered the removal of the posters, which had been pasted on the ERC offices in Carrer Calabria, in Carrer Consell de Cent and in in the Casal de l'Eixample. All of Maragall's leading rivals in the 28th May elections, mayor Ada Colau (BComú), the Junts candidate, Xavier Trias, and that of the PSC, Jaume Collboni, have shown their support for the Maragall brothers. The Catalan interior minister, Joan Ignasi Elena, called the derogatory poster focusing on the Alzheimer's illness of the ex-president "disgusting". "It is the result of hatred and the persecution of those who are different. All my support to the ex-president and mayor Pasqual Maragall and to the former minister Ernest Maragall. He is putting up with what he should not have to endure," he said from Parliament.
Pasqual Maragall was the Barcelona mayor who brought the city to the 1992 Olympic Games and led the council from 1982 to 1997, later being Catalan president from 2003 to 2006. In 2007 he announced that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's.