A Catalan man who was accused of a hate crime by Spanish police for wearing a clown nose during pro-independence protests has commented that the Spanish intelligence services "were not capable of finding the ballot boxes, but they found me very quickly".
Jordi Pessarrodona, a municipal councillor in the town of Sant Joan de Vilatorrada, and a clown by profession, became a well-known face in Catalonia late last year after the appearance of a photo of him wearing a clown nose, standing beside a member of the Civil Guard during a day of large-scale searches of Catalan government buildings on 20th September.
In comments he made on Saturday to an event held by the Catalan cultural group Òmnium entitled "Tomorrow it could be you", Pesarrodona explained that the accusation of hate crime made against him was a "nightmare" and reiterated that what he did had been a "completely peaceful protest action". "The clown nose is always an instrument of peace", he assured.
Moreover, the councillor joked about the fact that he had been "the only clown accused of a crime in Europe", although he said he didn't know if this was "good or bad". After several months, a judge shelved the accusation made against Pesarrodona.
The "Tomorrow it could be you" event held on Saturday in Barcelona, featured talks from several different figures, including Simona Levi, theatre director and founder of the XNET free cultural forum, political scientist Gemma Ubasart, and editor of the humour magazine Jueves, Guillermo Martínez-Vela, who analyzed the current state of repression in Spain.
The searches made on the day Pesarrodona was photographed next to the Civil Guard officer took place days before the Catalan independence referendum, when finding and confiscating the ballot boxes to be used for the vote was one of the Spanish authorities' objectives - and one they failed to achieve.