Yesterday at noon, 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 letter in which the magistrates provide new “documentary evidence” about the people who at that time allegedly illegally obtained at least twenty photographs of their IDs that were later published on the front page of the newspaper La Razón, where they be pointed out
After the publication, the magistrates already presented a joint complaint to the Barcelona Guard Court in which they requested the opening of an investigation to clarify who accessed the DNI databases and provided the images to the media communication A judicial process that was filed in Spain but that ended up in the European Court of Human Rights and that two years ago gave the judges the right and condemned the State for not having investigated the crime of revealing secrets and having violated the magistrates’ right to privacy.
Two weeks ago, the judges became aware 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 to former deputy director of the Police (DAO), Eugenio Pino, and the then commissioner and head of the information brigade of the Police in Catalonia, Pedro Esteban. Audios that the magistrates attach and transcribe along with various entries in Villarejo’s diaries and that refer to the leaking of the judges’ images.
The magistrates assessed the data and decided, for the time being, for these fourteen, to draft and submit the complaint to the Prosecutor’s Office of Catalonia, as judicial sources have confirmed to La Vanguardia.
What does the complaint say? The letter transcribes the conversation between the three policemen in which they talk about the intention of the judges in question to denounce the leak and the origin of the photographs of their IDs. Of the three, the most worried is Pedro Esteban, who considers what he will have to say if asked. Pino warns him that, if anyone asks him, limit himself to saying that he received verbal and direct orders from the head of Catalonia and that, since the judges had taken a position in favor of the right to decide, it was necessary to investigate its legality . Commissioner Esteban goes so far as to raise the possibility of “erasing” the trace of the search in the DNI database, a concern that the DAO dispels by assuring that “we are already doing it”.
The complaint warns that the evidence shows beyond any doubt that the three officials, far from their duty to protect, decided on their own to illegally obtain photographs of a group of judges which they later leaked to a media outlet. of communication for its publication and indication.
An action that the complainants frame as part of the so-called operation Catalonia, the maneuvers that, outside the law, were allegedly carried out by the police leadership during the period of Mariano Rajoy at the head of the government against independence, political rivals, as well as by cover up and obstruct corruption investigations affecting the Popular Party. It is a complaint that goes beyond the illegal obtaining of the photographs and their leakage, because it frames the criminal action in the context of an organization whose objective was to destroy any actor that they themselves linked to the pro-independence process .
Operation Catalonia, according to the data revealed by La Vanguardia, also targeted a prosecutor, who was the chief prosecutor of Catalonia, Martín Rodríguez Sol, and the Major of the Mossos d’Esquadra, Josep Lluís Trapero. The Prosecutor’s Office opened an ex officio investigation after the information from this newspaper was made public, and Trapero himself presented a complaint to the Prosecutor’s Office, to which is now added yesterday’s complaint by the fourteen Catalan judges, in addition of the one presented several weeks ago by the director of the detective agency Francisco Marco, and which fell into distribution in the court of inquiry number 4, which has not yet resolved it. Four cases, at the moment, in Catalan courts and which could lead to the Catalonia operation being investigated for the first time after all these years.
