The so-called patriotic police spied, within the Catalunya operation, on Jordi Sànchez starting in the summer of 2015 when the former secretary general of Junts presided over the Catalan National Assembly (ANC), and to do so they used a neighbor of the politician, as reported The mon to RAC 1.
The neighbor, identified by RAC 1 as P.O, to preserve his privacy, was the brother of the leader of the intelligence services of the Ministry of the Interior led by Jorge Fernández Díaz, and a founding member of the patriotic police, and was in charge of following the movements of Sànchez and report on the visits and packages that the independence leader received.
According to this information, in 2011, an architectural firm contacted Sànchez to join a community of owners to buy a plot of land in Barcelona and build an apartment block, to which the Junts politician moved with his family in the summer. 2015. P.O. also lived there, discovered the identity of his neighbor, and told his brother, as described in RAC 1.
With the information that P.O. compiled about Sànchez’s private life, at least two intelligence notes were prepared. RAC 1 claims that only half a dozen senior officials of the Ministry of the Interior and the National Police Corps knew about the role of the ANC president’s neighbor, and P.O. He met with them from time to time, in meetings where he got to know relevant figures from the so-called sewers of the State such as Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, or the deputy operational director of the National Police, Eugenio Pino.
The spying on Sànchez continued until the National Court sent the president of the Assembly to preventive detention in October 2017 for an alleged crime of rebellion due to the concentration in the Department of Economy on September 20, and the independence leader had to leave his home to enter the Soto del Real prison (Madrid).
In a face-to-face meeting between P.O. and El món to RAC 1, Sànchez’s neighbor admitted the meetings with the commissioners of the patriotic police, and assured that he never revealed his role to the president of the ANC. Likewise, P.O. He assured that his intention was to obtain information about the State sewers, insinuating that the patriotic police did not use him, but the other way around, although he did not reveal the reason for collecting that type of data. P.O. He also denied collecting from reserved funds, information that RAC 1 has been able to confirm.
Sànchez has assured that he knows who he is, but that he will not file any complaint, in statements to RAC 1. “As long as the judiciary and the police and intelligence body are not thoroughly reformed, the black box can very easily lead to situations like these.” , commented the former president of the ANC.
The former secretary general of Junts has been “shocked” by the news, “he is a person with whom you have lived and live with (…) door to door and wall to wall,” explained the independence leader, and added: “Now I understand some attitudes, curiosities, questions or attempts at approximation.”
In any case, Sànchez has stated that the neighbor will not have obtained information of interest: “that no one suffers, not on 1-O, not at the polls, nor was anything in danger that could come up in conversations with him. I am very discreet”. Likewise, he has reiterated “that it never happens again for the good of the country, for a democratic health that has been greatly affected.”
The president of the party, Carles Puigdemont, has shown his support for Sànchez through his X profile, and has described the espionage case as “Stasi methods typical of dictatorships.” Puigdemont has also assured that the events “cannot be trivialized or excused.”
