The two judges who are conditioning the future of the Amnesty law negotiation – Manuel García-Castellón, head of court number 6 of the National Court, and Joaquín Aguirre, of court number 1 of Barcelona – have a common thread in their proceedings in investigations that they direct or have directed linked to the police plot that acted illegally in the Ministry of the Interior of the government of Mariano Rajoy, of which the best-known member is ex-commissioner José Manuel Villarejo.
This common thread between the two is summed up in Aguirre’s proximity to the activities of that corrupt police plot, with the common goal of accusing Trapero of dealings with drug trafficking and García-Castellón’s refusal to investigate these actions il ·legal when the Catalan security body denounced them, since he was the investigating magistrate in the Tándem case, focused on Villarejo’s illegalities.
This is clear from the complaint submitted on the 12th by Trapero to the Barcelona Prosecutor’s Office after La Vanguardia and ElDiario.es published two informative notes by Villarejo on a database on police investigations.
Trapero’s document, of 45?pages, assures that since 2009 during the investigation of several cases on drug trafficking and police corruption in the protection of prostitution premises, Villarejo and his colleagues decided to act against what was then no of the Mossos criminal investigation division. The reason? Having caused the arrest or imputation of police friends or associates. To prove this, he provides known recordings in the Tándem case and the latest information published recently, in which there is talk of inventing a false case against him, tapping his phones, making false reports and finally reporting him to the National Audience.
According to Trapero, these documents “show that a series of allegedly criminal activities were carried out that targeted me and people who were under my command at the time, and that falsely attributed facts to me crimes with the intention of discrediting me”.
Finally, Villarejo and his colleagues chose to interfere in the investigation of Judge Aguirre’s cases and try to have the latter indict the Mossos officer. The judge had already staged visible clashes with Trapero. According to the complaint, “there were certain disagreements with the investigating judge arising from his intention to intercept the communications of all the members of the Civil Guard [who had confiscated a shipment of 45 kilos of cocaine in the context of the case Cerberus], but after verbally requesting the attached unit of the Mossos d’Esquadra [led by Trapero] that this request be made through a police office, a request to which I personally responded in the sense that I did not see sufficient motivation to do so , but that if the judge ordered it through an interlocutory order, this would be done, this interlocutory order was never issued and from that moment the relationship with the attached unit was broken”.
In May 2011, Judge Aguirre charged “practically all the agents and commanders of the attached unit”. They were in this situation for ten years, until the case against them was finally dismissed.
Trapero provides parts of documents from the Prosecutor’s Office in which he describes the judge’s behavior: “As one piece of evidence from the judge, supposedly incontestable, weakened to the point of evanescence, a different one was proposed.” Some very descriptive of his teaching methods: “He developed throughout the research a deep prejudice that led him to sustain his theory and enrich it by deciding without limit new diligences as the ones that were practiced they did not offer him the result he would have liked”. This, according to his critics, would also be the practice applied in the Voloh operation, with which, with successive changes in the meaning of the instruction, he intends to charge the former president of the Generalitat, Carles Puigdemont, with high treason.
The former head of the Mossos explains in his complaint that “members of the Prosecutor’s Office had made it clear to me that the will and intention of the investigating judge was to charge me, something that was spreading in these circles without any discretion”.
And in February 2015, Judge Aguirre asked the case analysis and review brigade of the Deputy Operational Directorate (DAO) of the Police to analyze the case. Precisely this brigade was one of the first levers that was activated in the Ministry of the Interior when Operation Catalunya was launched, among other initiatives sending agents to Barcelona to ask the prosecutors of the Palau case to register the headquarters of CDC less than a month before the 2012 election.
In September 2021, after some recordings of Commissioner Villarejo were published in which he spoke openly with other police officers, some investigated in the Barcelona cases, about the assembly of a false case against Trapero, the general commissioner of investigation of the Mossos d’Esquadra sent a report to Judge García-Castellón in case he considered that the facts referred to could be part of the Tándem case.
Contrary to what has happened in other cases, the judge responded relatively quickly to the Catalan police. According to Trapero’s complaint, on November 2, 2021, García Castellón replied to the intendant Toni Rodríguez, signatory of the report, that “the only indication on which the notification to the court was based was the existence of a conversation between several people, among whom was ex-commissioner Villarejo, and in which the will or purpose to carry out a series of acts to discredit third parties was revealed, even attributing- the commission of crimes, but no indication was provided to corroborate that the plan was carried out, nor that, consequently, the expressions uttered had been carried out”.
In other words, three policemen, agents of the active authority, charged in an infinite number of separate pieces precisely for illegal activities linked to blackmail, extortion and the manipulation of information, meet, talk about a plan legal action against a senior member of the Catalan police, and the judge in charge of the main case considers that there is no reason to believe that the plan was carried out. final point
