MADRID, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Spanish Civil Guard on Wednesday arrested 13 people and searched nine offices of the Catalan regional government (Generalitat) in an operation directed against the organization of the Oct. 1 independence referendum.
The Catalan Secretary for the Economy, Josep Maria Jove, is among those arrested, along with Treasury Secretary Josep Lluis Soldado, and Xavier Puig Farre from the office of social affairs.
Meanwhile, the Civil Guard searched the offices of the regional economy, labor and foreign affairs departments, looking for evidence of misuse of funds in the organization of the referendum, which has been declared illegal by the Spanish Constitutional Court.
The detentions came just a day after Civil Guard seized material linked to the electoral census from the offices of a private messenger service "Unipost".
Speaking in the Congress on Wednesday morning, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy defended the police actions, saying they were "carried out on the decision of a judge in order to ensure the law was complied with."
However, Catalan nationalists have reacted angrily to the arrests, with the leader of Ezquerra Republican (ERC) in Congress telling Rajoy to "take his dirty hands" off Catalonia, while Deputy Catalan leader, Oriol Junqueras, said that Spanish authorities were attacking Catalan "institutions and thus attacking its citizens."
The arrests also sparked protests in the center of Barcelona, with hundreds of people descending on the offices of the economy department, where ERC Deputy Joan Tarda made an appeal for the demonstration to be peaceful.
However, reports in the press suggest that some protesters punctured the tires of the Civil Guard vehicles parked nearby.
