From the chronicle of Lluís Sargatal Vaquer (Ripoll, 1927 – Barcelona, 1980) journalist sent specially to Sant Celoni by The Vanguard (6-I-1960) following the death on January 5 sixty-five years ago of the anti-Franco maquis Francesc Sabater Llopart, Quico Sabate (l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, 1915 – Sant Celoni, 1960). Own translation. An anarchist militant, during the Spanish war, Sabater starred in turbulent episodes within the republican area itself: he was accused of killing a communist political commissar and escaped from the prison where he was serving a sentence for this fact.
It was close to eight in the morning when the phone woke the corporal of the Sometent, Abel Rocha Sanz, a 38-year-old Sorian resident in Sant Celoni. The call came from the sergeant of the Civil Guard, commander of the site, Antonio Martínez Collado, who requested the help of the Sometent to organize the possible pursuit of the bandit Francesc Sabater Llopart, due to the fact that he was traveling on the express train that coming from Portbou was heading towards Barcelona, with a probable stop in Sant Celoni. The convoy slowed down before entering the town, the train driver being pressured by the Shoemaker, a moment that the guerrilla took advantage of to get off the locomotive, which he had boarded in the town of Fornells, near Girona. Knowing the presence of the bandit in the town of Sant Celoni, he began his search for the town centre. Shoemaker, wounded in one foot and the left buttock, was wearing a blue frog closed up to the neck by a zipper, and was carrying a “Thompson” caliber 45 machine gun, and a “Colt” pistol of the same caliber, as well as plenty of ammunition. Limping visibly, the bandit made his way through the lonely streets of the town, succeeding, because it was early, in passing unnoticed by the neighborhood. In the meantime, Sergeant Martínez Collado distributed the two civil guards he had at that time throughout the population, while he, with the two subordinates, Abel Rocha Sanz and Josep Sibina Morrull, set out to search for the Shoemaker through the streets of the town. Sabater, in an attempt to escape, crossed the town, reaching the opposite side of the station, covering almost a kilometer in a desperate escape. Arriving at the end of Carrer de Sant Josep, the Shoemaker, possibly with the intention of changing his clothes and recuperating from the effort, entered a house, whose inhabitant, seeing that he was asking for asylum a man who was carrying a machine gun under the frog objected to the intruder staying in the home, starting a hard struggle that pushed the two towards the street. At the same time that neighbor took the shoemaker’s machine gun, preventing him from firing, he screamed for help, which was heard by Sergeant Martínez and the submissives Rocha and Sibina, who came immediately. Having located the Shoemaker, the sergeant of the Civil Guard ordered the Sometent’s corporal to advance along an adjacent street, while he, with the other Sometent, would block his way. Rocha, armed with an automatic machine gun, saw the shoemaker in a fight with the owner of the assaulted house when he turned a corner. The criminal, kneeling on the ground, wielded the “Colt 45”; and when approaching him, the corporal of the Sometent managed, despite the opposition of the heroic neighbor he was fighting, to shoot at Rocha, wounding his right leg. Rocha, despite feeling wounded, repelled the attack with a burst of machine gun fire, shooting from the bottom up to avoid injuring with his shots the neighbor who at that time had been forced to leave go Savater’s machine gun. It was twenty seven minutes past eight. At the crossroads of Carrer Major and Carrer de Santa Tecla, in Sant Celoni, the sadly famous Francesc Sabater lay dead, clutching the “Thompson” submachine gun. Meanwhile, the neighborhood approached and attended to Abel Rocha and the neighbor who had resisted the bandit and who had also been wounded by the ricochet of a bullet.
Source: www.ara.cat
