Disruption of minute's silence "out of place", Borràs says, who denies greeting protesters responsible

BarcelonaA day after controversy broke out over protesters disrupting the minute's silence in remembrance of victims of the 2017 Ramblas terror attacks, suspended Catalan parliamentary speaker Laura Borràs has spoken to Catalunya Ràdio. Borràs, who on Wednesday only retweeted messages she received in support but did not retweet her party's explicit condemnation of the protest, said the action was "totally out of place", but claimed only one person took part, insisting on disassociating the disruption from the dozens of protesters demanding to know "the whole truth" about the terrorist attacks. "You will not find any video where I have greeted this person," she said. Several shouts can be heard in videos of the minute's silence, although most protesters kept quiet.

Borràs greeted protesters after the event, who received her to the cry of "president". This earnt her some veiled criticism from former JxCat secretary general Jordi Sànchez, who said the event should be free of "political protagonism". During the interview, Borràs denied having sought "protagonism" and stated she agrees with the words of Sànchez. She explained that she went to greet "a group" that protested "10, 15 or 20 minutes after" the end of the event, and stressed that she did not greet the people who can be seen confronting family members in a video published by several media outlets.

In the same vein, she asked to avoid "criminalising" all the people who were protesting, "many of them relatives of the victims". "That there were a hundred people who demanded to know the truth responds to the fact that it has been five years and there are still many unanswered questions," she explained: "Families and victims want to clarify the facts, and not only them, a society that has lived them must be able to know what happened." Borràs not only did not share the tweet made yesterday from JxCat's official twitter account which stated the "most energetic rejection of the interruption of the minute's silence", but retweeted MP Jaume Alonso Cuevillas's in which he assured that in any case "at the end of the minute's silence, people started to shout 'we want to know the truth'". Asked about the issue, Borràs attempted to put an end to the controversy and admitted that "it is out of place to interrupt a minute's silence": "A minute's silence should be respected, and this is what I do and what we do in JxCat".