The so-called patriotic police spied on senior Moroccan officials, such as the consul in Barcelona, ??because they suspected that the Moroccan authorities were allied with the independence movement, according to an investigation by RAC1.
The fear within the Ministry of the Interior at the time of Jorge Fernández Díaz of a Catalan-Moroccan alliance was such that the minister himself authorized surveillance, the recruitment of confidants and the use of reserved funds to try to find out if the Moroccan government had a secret agreement with the Generalitat, then chaired by Artur Mas. The police deployment began in mid-2014 and lasted for at least two years, until 2016, although the first suspicions were earlier, in 2013, according to the Grupo Godó station.
The person responsible for the operation was Commissioner Pedro Esteban, an expert from the Spanish National Police in the fight against jihadism. He was deployed in Barcelona as head of the Information Brigade and, therefore, was in charge of collecting all the intelligence data available in Catalonia. Esteban, who also participated in other operations in the State sewers, dealt directly with Minister Fernández Díaz and the head of the Spanish police, Eugenio Pino.
El Món a RAC1 has had access to two secret reports from 2014 and 2015 that reached the Minister of the Interior’s desk and that demonstrate the scope of the plot. Among much other information, the confidential documents include the content of the meetings that the Moroccan consul in Barcelona held with people from the Moroccan community who, according to the patriotic police, spread the independence message.
The investigation, according to RAC1 in an information signed by Jordi de Planell, was initially focused on a Convergència i Unió foundation, Nous Catalans, dedicated to strengthening ties with immigrants living in Catalonia, but it went much further, as that fear was growing within the Ministry of the Interior of a Catalan-Moroccan alliance to move forward with the independence process. They were convinced that the Generalitat had in its hands a strategy to approach the various communities of migrants living in Catalonia to gain followers for the independence movement and they maintained that one of the key axes of this project was the Fundació Nous Catalans, linked to Convergència and Union. This was written in an informative note on October 10, 2014 that reached Minister Fernández Díaz’s desk.
In this same secret document, they warned that Nous Catalans was closely linked to an Islamic association called Unió de Centers Culturals Islàmics de Catalunya, an entity that, according to the investigation, worked for the Moroccan government. The agents even claimed that the leader of the Unió de Centers Culturals Islàmics de Catalunya had been a secret agent of the Moroccan government. In fact, according to the note, he was expelled in 2013 for espionage.
The investigation progresses and a few months later, Minister Fernández Díaz receives another secret report. It is a document from April 2015 and shows that at that time the suspicions of the patriotic police had evolved: they were no longer so afraid that the independence movement would make an agreement with Morocco; What they were afraid of then was that the Moroccan government would take advantage of the desire for sovereignty to gain new followers to infiltrate and direct it from within.
The report follows the steps of several prominent figures of the Moroccan community in Catalonia and includes the content of some meetings in the official office of the Moroccan consul in Catalonia, Ghoulam Maichane. What’s more: the agents followed him so closely that they even knew what material they gave him in the meetings. The patriotic police believed that the Moroccan consul was coordinating with the representatives of that country’s community in Catalonia to place them on electoral lists of parties such as Convergència and ensure that they were promoted. All, according to researchers, with the approval of the Rabat government.
In the end, despite the resources used, the only thing Minister Fernández Díaz did with all that information was leak it to a newspaper, La Razón, which in 2015 accused the independence movement of fraternizing with radical Islam in the midst of a wave of jihadist attacks in Europe. Clean Hands tried to use the published news to open a court case against Nous Catalans, as he had done with the Pujol case, but it did not succeed and all that came to nothing.
The former president of the Generalitat Artur Mas denied this Tuesday in statements to RAC1 that there were agreements with Morocco for the neighboring country to support independence. “Not at all,” he assured. “What we did have was a close relationship with the consular corps,” detailed the former president, who also highlighted the ties with the Moroccan community located in Catalonia with the desire for integration and following the motto of “un sol poble.” .
For Mas, who has highlighted that they had diplomatic relations with various countries and that when he was at the Palau de la Generalitat he received ambassadors and consuls, thinking that Catalonia had a pact with Morocco is “fantasy” and he has equated that theory “with 10,000 Russian soldiers that Putin was going to send”, while pointing out that “spying on the consul general is spying on the State”. Thus, he considers that Moroccans have been spied on “due to a poorly founded suspicion regarding the issue of the process.”
