Indignation, repulsion, the messages of rejection of the posters that last March 9 appeared around three Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) headquarters in Barcelona mocking Pasqual Maragall's Alzheimer's were unanimous in the class Catalan politics. The Mossos d'Esquadra opened an ex officio investigation and found very clear images of the three authors of hanging the posters, recorded by a hotel's security camera. La Vanguardia has had access to those images.
The photographs correspond to three young people who the investigators of the General Information Commission, in charge of the case, do not locate in any of the groups they usually work on. A fact that leads them to suspect the possibility that the three individuals were no more than the simple executors of hanging the posters, but on behalf of other people, the instigators of the campaign.
All the posters were identical, they were hung with adhesive tape by hand, and they showed in the foreground an old photograph of Pasqual Maragall and a more recent one of his brother and mayor for ERC in Barcelona, Ernest Maragall, with the sentence: " Out of Barcelona's alzheimer".
Precisely, three days after the appearance of the posters, Maragall assured that "the most significant thing is to know who thought of it, who decided, who organized it, who paid for it. This surely has answers".
And it is precisely the search for these answers that the Information police are in charge of, who yesterday Wednesday shared the images with the rest of the investigation units to see if there was any luck and the face of any of the three young men was familiar to someone
With the help of the lawyer Olga Arderiu, Ernest Maragall decided to file a personal complaint in which he reports that the posters were hung in the vicinity of three of the ERC headquarters and in different streets of Barcelona.
The prosecutor for hate crimes, Miguel Ángel Aguilar, is leading the investigation, waiting for the Mossos d'Esquadra to identify the three young men, arrest them and take a statement from them. It will be then, with the certificate in hand, when the case will be brought to court and it will be decided how to typify an action that some jurists already warned at the time that it would not go beyond being cataloged as bad taste hooliganism, without criminal consequences for those in charge.
As soon as the existence of these posters became known, Barcelona City Council ordered the municipal cleaning brigades to remove them immediately.
