A shocking live report from Barcelona caught the moment police fired rubber bullets and threw stun grenades at “unarmed voters”.
Voters across the Catalonia region are taking part this morning in the controversial independence referendum, which the Spanish central government have deemed illegal.
Sky News journalist Mark Stone was broadcasting the moment a peaceful protest turned violent in a central Barcelona square.
According to Stone, the Catalan voters had staged a sit-in protest to block the riot police from moving on after they had seized ballot ballots.
But in the middle of an interview with a voter, who was praising the “peaceful demonstration of democracy,” Spanish police burst through the crowd with batons.
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Large explosions and screams can be heard in the shocking televised footage as chaos broke out on the streets.
The Spanish Civil Guard then fired rubber bullets and stun grenades while the police vans drove away.
An Israeli MP, who is in the city as an international observer of the vote, said she saw “people bleeding from shots to the head” when the authorities moved into the crowd.
She told Stone: “We saw a lot of unarmed peaceful people and we saw police shooting bullets at them.
“It seems to be escalating. I did not expect this at all from European democracy.”
A local voter also caught in the melee told Sky News that the Spanish Government were “not thinking about democracy”.
The chaos surrounding the controversial vote today has thrown the country into its worst constitutional crisis in decades.
Other incidents have seen elderly men and women carried by officers away from the voting stations.