Spain: Headless Franco statue pulled down 4 days after unveiling

A group of protesters pulled-down the temporary statue of former Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco in the El Born district of Barcelona on Thursday. The statue was installed on Monday.
Three people scaled the low fence guarding the sculpture and yanked at it until it fell to the ground. Two garbage trucks had to carry away the remains and one of the people responsible was later detained by the police and released.
The temporary statue and concurrent exhibition, titled "Franco, Victory, Republic. Impunity and Urban Space," were put on display at the Born Centre for Culture and Memory (BCCM) in a bid to spark conversation about the erstwhile Spanish dictator. However, the statue, which inexplicably lost its head while in storage during 2013, caused anger among locals during its installation, leading to fist fights during its unveiling.
Alongside objections to the alleged normalisation and glorification of Franco's reign from 1939 to 1975, the population of El Born, a stronghold of the Catalan independence movement, found the installation particularly offensive angry due to the dictator's attacks on Catalan identity. Aside from more furtive shutdowns of the independence movement, Franco also banned Catalonia's National Day, the region's celebration of the end of the siege of Barcelona in 1714.