The judge of the National Court José Luis Calama has agreed to unconditional imprisonment for the detainee for sending several letters with explosives to various political leaders and institutions, including the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez. According to legal sources, the prosecutor had requested the measure after he refused to testify before the instructor.
The judge attributes crimes of injuries and terrorist threats aggravated by being the victims members of the Government, in addition to another crime of manufacturing, use of explosive, flammable, incendiary devices for terrorist purposes.
In his opinion, the crimes with which he is charged are reasons to make him believe that there is a risk of flight, concealment of sources of evidence and risk of committing other criminal acts.
The letters with pyrotechnic material were sent in two batches. The first of the letters, addressed to Pedro Sánchez, was detected on November 24. Later, another at the Ukrainian embassy in Spain. There were four more letters during the first days of December. One of them, that of the Torrejón de Ardoz military base (Madrid), did not detonate and served to follow the trail to the suspect.
“The actions that are objectively attributed to him (sending six envelopes with boxes containing explosive substances on three different days), the context in which they occur (Ukrainian war) and the recipients of the packages show that both the objective of seriously altering public peace, transmitting the message that we are facing actions carried out by people linked to Russia as repression of the interests of Spain and the United States as a result of their support for Ukraine in the face of Russian occupation”, explains the magistrate to justify the imputation of the crime of terrorism.
The detainee fed his knowledge about the invasion through pro-Russian websites such as Russiatoday.com; RT, Russian news portal; www.armas.es, a portal that calls itself the “worldwide digital newspaper on weapons in Spanish”; www.química.es; and sputniknews.com.
It points out that “the use of Russian instant messaging applications, such as VK, and end-to-end encrypted emails (Protonmail), as well as the significance of their violent actions as a means of propaganda for the Russian occupation in Ukraine, could facilitate their fled to Russian territory, receiving help from citizens of that country for that purpose. And for this reason, he believes that there are sufficient reasons to agree to his admission to prison, in addition to a risk of criminal repetition.
The Scientific Police extracted remains of DNA from the envelope that contained a rudimentary explosive system with some pyrotechnic material. However, the biological tests found no match in the police records. It was possible to verify that the sender’s address was false and that the handwriting used, according to the analysis, could belong to an elderly person.
According to sources of the investigation, the stamps used by the author of the shipment were the origin of the thread. Despite the fact that they were sent from Valladolid, their tracking was able to show that they were purchased in Burgos.
After that, the envelopes used, purchased online, were analyzed. The agents came to detect the supplier and buyers of the consignment. And that thread continued to be pulled until it reached Burgos again. With the control of the IPs of the buyers’ computers, the siege was narrowed until reaching the main suspect.
