The Mossos d'Esquadra of the General Information Police Station have very good quality images of the three young people responsible for placing the posters that made fun of Pasqual Maragall's Alzheimer's disease, in various places in the city of Barcelona. The cameras of a hotel in the capital near the place where the posters were hung have offered high-quality images with which the researchers work and to which La Vanguardia has had access. None of the three suspects is under the gaze of investigators specialized in radical sectors. Therefore, all options and hypotheses are open, including the possibility that the three chosen were merely in charge of placing the posters and that they were paid to do so.
The Catalan police ex officio opened a hate crime investigation, to which was added the complaint filed by Maragall himself. The general information police station shared the images this Wednesday with the rest of the investigation units in the Barcelona region and the rest of the organization to try to see if they are identified. With this dissemination of the images, the investigators hope that it will not take long to identify the perpetrators and determine, after giving them a statement and transferring the reports to the corresponding judge, if they committed some type of crime or it was an extremely bad act of vandalism. taste.
The posters showed the current ERC candidate for mayor of Barcelona, Ernest Maragall, and his brother, Pasqual Maragall, along with the phrase "Alzheimer's out of Barcelona", alluding to the disease suffered by the former president of the Generalitat and former mayor. from the Catalan capital.
The mayor himself considered in an interview on March 10, at which time the information came out, that the posters are a representation of "extreme political violence." In an interview with Jordi Basté in El món to RAC1, Maragall expressed that they are not just an offense against his brother or himself: "They offend the hundreds of thousands of Alzheimer's patients that there may be in the world and that are used as currency of change on a political scale".
The posters appeared around the offices of Calabria and Consell de Cent, as well as in the Casal del Eixample, and at the Aerobús stop in Plaza Catalunya and on some trees in the Les Corts neighborhood.
The City Council already had them removed a few days ago. Mayor Ada Colau showed her rejection of this campaign, which she described as "despicable." "It does nothing but foster stigma towards people with Alzheimer's and their families," stressed the mayoress.
Maragall and ERC also received messages of support from other political rivals, who also condemned the events. This was the case of the Junts candidate for mayor, Xavier Trias, who described the action as being "loaded with indignity." "My condemnation and rejection of this unpresentable attack and all the solidarity with President Maragall, and Ernest Maragall," he assured. The PSC candidate, Jaume Collboni; the candidate of Ciutadans, Anna Grau, or the candidate of the Catalan PP, Daniel Sirera.
