The former commissioner of the National Police José Manuel Villarejo, a key character in the so-called Catalunya operation and other parapolice plots such as Kitchen, assured this Tuesday that at the time (2012-2016) he informed the then president of the government Mariano Rajoy of the operation devised by the Ministry of the Interior commanded by Jorge Fernández Díaz to confront the Catalan independence crisis with procedures outside the law and formal police protocols.
“The information that I passed on to the minister came to me from two people who connected with me on behalf of the president,” explained the former commissioner in El Món to RAC1, where he was interviewed after the new revelations resulting from a joint investigation by La Vanguardia and Eldiario. .is. Villarejo has gone further and said that at a time when he was with the then general secretary of the PP, María Dolores de Cospedal, “Rajoy came down and told me: ‘Let’s work’.” “It was a way of telling me that he was aware of everything, that I should not doubt those messengers that I received in his name,” said the former police officer.
“Rajoy was the fundamental factor in the origin of all the operations that were carried out against the independence movement (…) Without this leadership, it would have been impossible to have acted with the effectiveness that was done,” added Villarejo, for whom “ The current lawyer of the PP is a lieutenant prosecutor who is a close friend of all the current judges and prosecutors who carry out these proceedings.” For this reason, Villarejo concluded, “they have never charged Rajoy or De Cospedal, despite the extensive number of data that points to them.”
Villarejo has also referred to the preventive imprisonment of the former president of FC Barcelona Sandro Rosell for 22 months accused of laundering illegal commissions to reiterate that at the time he already warned that it was a mistake. “Rosell was identified as a target, as a driving force of the independence movement,” said the former police officer. “I said that what was being done with this man was a mistake and yet they went ahead and imprisoned him,” Villarejo insisted. “I have said many times that the information about him was false.”
To conclude, the former commissioner said he regretted “this injustice”, but warned that “what is dangerous and problematic is that these actions go unpunished and without consequences.” “The judge (Carmen Lamela) is still in the Supreme Court handing down sentences,” he denounced.
