Between February and July 2007, Javier Gómez Bermúdez presided over the macro-judgment for the 11-M attacks. Twenty-nine people sat in the dock, including material perpetrators, inducers and collaborators, despite the absence of the seven terrorists who immolated themselves in an apartment in Leganés three weeks after the massacre and that of that they managed to escape; most of them in Syria and Iraq, where they would die fighting with the Islamic State. Gómez Bermúdez receives La Vanguardia at the headquarters of Ramon y Cajal Abogados, a prestigious law firm in Madrid, which signed him in 2017, when he took a voluntary leave of absence from his judicial career. He doesn’t rule out coming back one day.
perfectly I lived then, as I have lived for many years, very close to the Audiencia Nacional and used to arrive at the office no later than a quarter to nine. I was just shaving and I heard the news on the radio.
When during the first hours the authorship was attributed to ETA, what did you think?
When I arrived at the National Court, almost all of us agreed that it had been ETA. On the previous 24 December, he had put 50 kilos of dynamite on the Irun-Madrid express, but the timer had run out of batteries. Then you automatically associate one thing with the other. But after three hours we all started to think he was an Islamist. For many reasons. For example, a tedax made a visual recognition and literally said: ‘It’s rubber-2’. The reason is very simple, because it has a raw color, while the Titadine, which was the alternative hypothesis [the one pointing to ETA], is red.
That morning the Abertzale leader Arnaldo Otegi attributed it to Islamic radicalism. Did you believe him?
From a judicial point of view, no. But he used his contact with the band to confirm whether or not it had been ETA before reacting. Otegi had information, as we already had at mid-morning that day, that he was an Islamist.
As president of the court, what memories do you have of the sanity trial, positive and negative?
Almost all are positive. The only negative memory I have was my performance on the first day for the treatment I gave to Endika Zulueta [Rabei Osman’s defense lawyer], which was unacceptable and for that I apologized publicly.
Do you think that the trial of 11-M was the most important in the history of Spain?
It’s hard to say. It may be the most traumatic event since the Civil War, but there are much more important judgments in terms of the advancement of criminal law.
Why were there so many conspiracy theories?
Many factors came together. One, not having given the slightest information about what was being investigated. One thing is the secrecy of the summary, which prevents information from being given, but there are ways to maintain contact with citizens through the media. Second, the fact that society was completely divided, with media supporting the Spanish government’s version and others the opposite. Interestingly, these sectors are exchanged from the point of view of the treatment of the court and especially me. Before the trial I was a dangerous fascist and after the trial I was a dangerous communist. I have always been on the right and I have never hidden it. I’m conservative, but I’m not ultra of anything. There was a political interest in delegitimizing the result of the elections and reaching the next one and that there was another result. And it was downright nasty.
The conspiracy theory that has persisted the most has been orchestrated around Jamal Zougam, convicted on the basis of a witness…
This is not true, this is a test.
Are the witnesses who recognized him on the trains unquestionable for you?
it’s not me We are eight magistrates, five from the Supreme Court and three from the National Court, for whom the witness is full. But the conviction is based not only on the testimony, but on much more data: a phone card he used that had been activated in Morata de Tajuña [where the bombs were manufactured], the fact that all the phones and cards were bought from his announcer… It is true that he did not sell them physically, but his half brother. There was much more data. And he was a man who had relations with fundamentalism from a long time ago. In fact, he miraculously avoided being tried two or three times, especially in the Dátil operation. It’s not a single piece of data. Having said that, let there be eight magistrates and let no one doubt that there is enough evidence of charge for a conviction of that importance, well man… a lot can happen in the world and we are all human, but from a from a technical point of view there was no reason to doubt its authorship. There were even oddities: at the trial, his mother and common-law brother testified that he was in bed at 9:30 a.m., but not that he was there at 7 or 8 a.m. [the bombs are they placed on four trains that left Alcalá de Henares from 7.01 am]. But in fact, the surprising thing is that they didn’t say it at the hearing when he was in pretrial detention. I don’t take it as proof, but as another fact. The gym: how strange that I went to the gym the day before and that the shift was broken and then there was no check-in. But none of those at the reception said they saw him.
In general: are those witnesses at a time of such confusion reliable from a legal point of view?
Basing a conviction only on a visual recognition in a moment of shock or trauma, let’s say it must be a very solid recognition. In this case there was. But the fact is that there were two protected witnesses, of Romanian nationality, who fully match, and there was a third protected witness who did not come to the trial, but his testimony was incorporated by reading and is also valid, which was identical to them And they didn’t know each other. To give an example, ETA terrorism has been convicted with twenty times less evidence. We were very meticulous.
What questions remain twenty years later?
In no crime, no one knows 100% of the facts. In this case, I think we have had knowledge of more than 90% or 95%. If anything harmed the investigation and favored those theories it was the fact of continually reacting to conspiracies. In the fourth month after the attacks, we knew the same thing as four years ago. It’s that we got into ridiculous situations.
In that 5 or 10% is there something that arouses a significant greater interest to you?
It is that the procedural object of a sane trial is determined by the accusations. Let’s start We started from two premises: first, that the hard core committed suicide in Leganés. And that is an unfillable hole. But secondly, I still don’t know how they all got in touch. One part is Jamal Ahmidan, El Chino, and another part is El Tunecino, Serhane Ben Abdelmajid. But there are some that I don’t know where they came from. Because it was not the subject of the process.
How do you think they became fanatical? Who was the leader?
I have no doubt here. They had already seen what ETA tried, no one had to come and tell them how to attack. Any of them, possibly the Tunisian with Allekema Lamari and others, thought of doing it this way. If he tells me that the intellectual author is the individual, man or woman, who devised the way to commit the crime, I tell him that the intellectual author was almost certainly among the dead. And the reason is hatred, intolerance. The Tunisian is from an upper-middle-class family, who came here on a scholarship from the State to study… This man had a deep hatred for everything that was Western. And like him, everyone in the group, each for their own reasons. The religious motive is a simple justification.
In some of the scenes there were biological remains and footprints that were never identified. Is it an unknown that will persist?
Seven people commit suicide in Leganés and there is an unidentified DNA profile. We have no data.
There has recently been speculation about a possible role for Morocco in the plot… revenge for the Perejil islet episode, for Spain’s dominance in the Mediterranean… Is it believable?
Absolutely not. That this is Morocco’s revenge for the islet of Perejil, I would laugh if we weren’t talking about something so serious. You can’t deny reality with speculation. There is not a single intelligence service in the world, not one, that supports that theory, including the Spanish CNI. What’s more, Morocco actively collaborates to be able to arrest the perpetrators.
What differences do you see between the current modus operandi and the ones you had to judge?
At that time we were all with our arms down because we were thinking about ETA. I couldn’t think of such an attack. When the states already arm themselves with legal, police and intelligence mechanisms, which make it very difficult to commit a major attack, the doctrine of the so-called “lone wolf” arises, which is neither a wolf nor a loner, but come on . It is individual terrorism that is very easy to execute.
Although he left the judiciary, how can you pursue that phenomenon that needs so few tools? How can you combat what is sometimes just the intention to do something?
This is a very interesting question from the point of view of lawyers. Because? Because all over the world the reaction is exorbitant. With extreme laws, which are almost the laws of dictatorships. From the Patriot Act in the United States, or in Great Britain… Spain reacted very calmly. Unfortunately, we had ETA and had a much stronger foundation. Self-indoctrination is a very dangerous type of crime, but in Spain there is a court specialized in terrorism, the Audiencia Nacional, which corrects the drifts that could have a loose interpretation of those types of crimes so… so extensive, in the meaning that they cover so many possibilities, so many facts. It is necessary to be very careful in its interpretation.
Do we have enough instruments?
Yes. I don’t think anything else can be done. Consider that the central body of the Criminal Procedure Law dates from 1882. Modern instruments were needed and the 2014 reform regulates it very well, and very consensually. In 2004, you could not put a microphone in the home of a suspected terrorist without warning him first. We were in the calves. You couldn’t do ambient recordings either, with directional microphones. There were a number of important legal loopholes.
Why did he leave the judiciary?
For many things. There came a time when, for various reasons, I thought I was dead, that I would never progress in my career, I could not reach the Supreme. I asked for a way out. With the invaluable understanding of President Rajoy and Rafael Hernando, my friend, and other members of what was then the ruling party, I was sent to Paris as a liaison judge. While in France, a close friend, also a surplus magistrate, suggested that I go to law. I did not want to return to the judicial career and decided to change my mind for a season. Six years ago.
Go back to?
I do not know. To me, to feel like it… I feel like it. But it’s downright complicated. We’ll see.
