At noon yesterday, 14 of the 33 Catalan judges who in February 2014 signed a manifesto in favor of the right to decide in Catalonia presented a complaint to the Catalan Prosecutor’s Office. A document in which the magistrates provide new “documentary evidence” about the people who at that time allegedly illegally obtained at least twenty photographs of their DNI that were later published on the front page of the newspaper La Razón, where they were pointed out.
After that publication, the magistrates already presented a joint complaint in the Barcelona court in which they requested the opening of an investigation to clarify who accessed the DNI databases and provided the images to that media outlet. A judicial process that was filed in Spain but that ended in the European Court of Human Rights, which two years ago agreed with the judges and condemned the State for not having investigated the crime of revealing secrets and having violated the right to privacy. of the magistrates.
Two weeks ago, the judges learned of the existence of one of the recordings made by the former commissioner of the National Police, José Manuel Villarejo. Some audios recorded by himself and in which he talks with the former Deputy Director of the Police (DAO), Eugenio Pino, and the then commissioner and head of the Police Information Brigade in Catalonia, Pedro Esteban. Audios that the magistrates attach and transcribe along with various notes in Villarejo’s agendas and that refer to the leak of the judges’ images.
The magistrates evaluated the data and decided, for the moment, those 14, to write and present the complaint to the Prosecutor’s Office of Catalonia, as La Vanguardia has confirmed judicial sources.
What does the complaint say? The writing transcribes the conversation between the three police officers in which they talk about the intention of the judges in question to denounce the leak and the origin of the photographs of their ID. Of the three, the most concerned is Pedro Esteban, who proposes what he will have to say if they ask him. Pino warns him that if someone asks him, he should limit himself to saying that he received verbal and direct orders from the superior head of Catalonia and that as long as the judges had positioned themselves in favor of the right to decide, the legality of it had to be investigated. Commissioner Esteban even raises the possibility of “erasing” the trace of the search in the DNI database, a concern that the DAO dissipates by assuring: “We are already doing it.”
The complaint warns that the evidence clearly shows that the three officials, far from their obligation to protect, decided on their own to illegally obtain photographs of a group of judges, which they later leaked to a media outlet for publication. and signaling.
An action that the complainants frame within the so-called Catalunya operation, the maneuvers that the police leadership allegedly carried out outside the law during Mariano Rajoy’s time as head of the Government against the independence movement, political rivals, as well as to cover up and hinder the corruption investigations that affected the Popular Party. A complaint that goes beyond the illegal obtaining of the photographs and their leak, because it frames the criminal action in the context of an organization that had the objective of destroying any actor that they themselves linked to the independence process.
A Catalunya operation that, according to data revealed by La Vanguardia, also targeted a prosecutor, the former chief prosecutor of Catalonia Martín Rodríguez Sol and the best of the Mossos d’Esquadra, Josep Lluís Trapero. The prosecutor’s office opened an ex officio investigation after learning of the information from this newspaper, and Trapero himself filed a complaint with the prosecutor’s office. Complaint to which is now added yesterday’s complaint from the 14 Catalan judges, in addition to the one also presented several weeks ago by the director of the detective agency Francisco Marco, and which fell into distribution in the investigating court number 4, which is still has not resolved. Four cases, for the moment, in Catalan courts and that could lead to the Catalunya operation being investigated for the first time after all these years.
