The agents of the Commissaria General d’Información – the intelligence service of the National Police – assure that the investigation into who is behind the shooting of Alejo Vidal-Quadras is the “most complicated” case they have dealt with faced in recent years. A recent arrest at the border of Colombia, another suspect who allegedly fled to Morocco, the shooter who could be in France or Portugal or the famous Iranian clue pointed out by the victim explain well how the mess of the investigation crosses borders, hindering progress. At the moment, in the secret case, which continues to be investigated for terrorism, there are more questions than certainties, although the agents are confident that they will be able to fit the puzzle even if there are many missing pieces to find.
Colombian authorities arrested Greg Oliver Higuera Marcano, known as Maquia, on Tuesday. An Interpol red alert for terrorism weighed on him, which was triggered when he tried to enter Colombia irregularly from Venezuela, where he is a native. Despite the media coverage that the arrest had, police sources minimize the impact that the arrest may have on progress in the investigation. Maquia’s role in the plan to assassinate the former leader of the Popular Party in Catalonia has little weight.
The Venezuelan met on the Costa del Sol with another of the detainees – now on provisional release -, to whom he entrusted the purchase of the motorcycle with which the hitman fled the central Salamanca neighborhood after firing a shot at canyon in Vidal-Quadras. As the unemployed man from Malaga declared at the National Court, Maquia paid him for the acquisition and paperwork of the motorcycle.
As El Confidencial advanced, the National Police is looking for another piece of the puzzle that may be more important to dispel the mystery. This is the Moroccan Sami Bekal Bounouare, alias Pacho. This individual, whose whereabouts are unknown, exchanged several messages after the attack on Vidal-Quadras with the only detainee who was sent to provisional prison, Naraya Gómez, for having been highly involved in the plot. In this crossing of messages it was reported that the plan had gone well. Even so, sources close to the investigation say that, contrary to what has been published, it is not at all clear that Pacho was the mastermind of the attack against one of the founders of Vox.
So far, investigations have not allowed Bekal Bounouare to be placed on any specific rung of the criminal pyramid. Although the investigators are clear that his role was not residual, as Maquia’s could have been, they do reject the idea that he culminated as the organizer of the attack. The mess that the researchers are trying to untangle does not allow, for now, to glimpse how many more knots are hidden.
Hunting Pacho is one of the priorities of the Information Commissioner. The collaboration with the Moroccan gendarmes is essential. This unit of the National Police works very closely in anti-terrorist matters with the police of Morocco, where exactly the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, went on Friday. After meeting with his counterpart, he highlighted the close police cooperation between neighboring countries that last year made it possible to arrest more than fifty suspected terrorists.
At this point in the investigation, the hypothesis that Iran may be behind the attack, as the politician indicated, is not the only one on the table. There are also alleged murky economic affairs in which Vidal-Quadras could be involved, who acknowledged that the Iranian resistance financed the first steps of Santiago Abascal’s party with almost one million euros.
Ministerial sources explain that on the morning of November 9, when the pact between the PSOE and Junts to invest Pedro Sánchez as president had been made public, the attack could become “a real destabilizing element”, something that prevented the quick political and police reaction.
At a time when several countries appear scattered in the instruction, no hypothesis is ruled out.
