Protests over Spain flood response interrupt king’s visit to stricken Valencia suburb

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By Manuel Ausloos and Antony Paone

PAIPORTA, Spain (Reuters) -Hundreds of residents of a Valencia suburb badly hit by last week’s deadly floods protested on Sunday during a visit by Spanish King Felipe, Queen Letizia, and Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, with some throwing mud at them.

Chanting “Murderers, murderers!” they vented pent-up anger over what has been widely perceived by local residents as tardy alerts from the authorities about the dangers of Tuesday’s flooding, and then a late response by the emergency services when disaster struck.

“Please, the dead are still in the garages, the families are looking for their relatives and friends. Please come, we only ask for help … All we wanted was to be warned and we would have been saved,” yelled one resident, Nuria Chisber, with tears in her eyes.

“It was known and nobody did anything to avoid it,” a young man told the king, who insisted on staying to talk to people despite the turmoil, while the prime minister had quickly withdrawn.

Spain is a parliamentary monarchy where the king is head of state.

At one point in the visit to the stricken suburb of Paiporta, Felipe, wearing a simple dark raincoat, distinguishable from distance by his height and grey hair, held to his shoulder a man who was crying.

Online footage showed his wife, Letizia, crying as she hugged some residents. Her hair and face had traces of mud and one of her bodyguards had blood on his face, apparently from a hurled object.

Bodyguards had opened umbrellas to try to protect the royals.

The death toll from the country’s worst flash floods in modern history edged higher to 217 on Sunday – almost all in the Valencia region and over 60 of them in Paiporta alone.

Some of Sunday’s protesters wore clothing with the symbols of far-right organisations which often stage protests against the leftist government.

“We are not going to get sidetracked by some marginal acts,” Sanchez said, referring to the incidents and the need to repair damage caused by the flood. Photos showed his official car with windows broken.

As the king tried to calm the mood, he also referred to attempts by agitators to destabilise the situation.

“There is a lot of toxic information going around and a lot of people interested in chaos,” he told the crowd.

As it started drizzling, police cars with loudspeakers drove around Valencia warning of more heavy rains coming later on Sunday.

BLAME GAME

The central government has said issuing alerts to the population is the responsibility of regional authorities. But the Valencia authorities have said they acted as best as they could with the information available to them.

Dozens of people were still unaccounted for, while some 3,000 households had no electricity, officials said.

“With a timely warning to the population, many fatalities could have been avoided,” Jorge Olcina, climate expert at the University of Alicante, told Reuters, also pointing to poor coordination between national and regional authorities.

He added though that the magnitude of the disaster made it “difficult to handle”.

Sanchez said on Saturday that any potential negligence would be investigated and called for political unity in the face of the tragedy.

Valencia’s regional leader Carlos Mazon, who also visited Paiporta to boos and insults from protesters, posted on X: “I understand the public anger and of course I will stay to receive it. It is my political and moral obligation. The King’s attitude this morning has been exemplary.”

Thousands of additional troops and police joined the disaster relief effort over the weekend in the largest such peacetime operation in Spain.

The floods engulfed streets and lower floors of buildings, sweeping away cars and pieces of masonry in tides of mud.

The tragedy is already Europe’s worst flood-related disaster in a single country since 1967, when at least some 500 people died in Portugal.

Scientists say extreme weather events are becoming more frequent in Europe and elsewhere due to climate change. Meteorologists think the warming of the Mediterranean, which increases water evaporation, plays a key role in making torrential rains more severe.

(Additional reporting by Ana Cantero and Eva Manez; Writing by Andrei Khalip; Editing by Frances Kerry, Christina Fincher and David Holmes)