Five of the six civil guards accused of having purchased and used illegal beacons as part of an investigation into drug trafficking asked the investigating judge this Monday to be defended by the prosecution. The five agents, plus the brigadier who acted as their leader, were summoned before the president of the Court of Instruction number 54 of Madrid to declare that they were the subject of an investigation for crimes against privacy, but the magistrate, at the request of these five accused, his declaration was postponed, report judicial sources.
The sixth defendant, a brigadier who dealt with the rest of the defendants within the economic crime team of the Madrid Civil Guard, refused to answer questions that the private accusations, the prosecution or the magistrate might ask him. His lawyer, who only represents the brigade, did not ask him any questions, specify the same sources. This brigade has been indicted since September last year after confessing in a recording to the fraudulent use of location beacons.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office is not obliged to defend all officials accused of crimes committed in the exercise of their duties and, before making a decision, it assesses the type of crime being investigated and the possible damage caused to the State administration itself.
The six people investigated belong to the Civil Guard team that prepared the reports that attempted to blame the spread of the Covid-19 epidemic in 2020 on the central government for authorizing a feminist march. The government delegate in Madrid, José Manuel Franco, was accused in this case, but the judge ended up dismissing it.
The six officers are charged with an alleged privacy offense for their actions in a separate case from 8M, in which they face charges of placing two tracking devices on a woman’s car and motorcycle without authorization. of their targets, an alleged drug trafficker which was subsequently investigated before the National Court.
In a recording published in September 2023, the brigade investigated confesses to the irregularities that he and his colleagues commit in several cases entrusted to them, as reported by elDiario.es. “This tag is illegal. “I am the most illegal of illegal immigrants,” he goes so far as to say. The recording ultimately represented the first of charges for illegal tags, which the squad admitted was used in the audio. Its contents were brought to the drug trafficking case by one of the defense attorneys.
The alleged cocaine trafficking organization was targeted by the Civil Guards in an operation called Águila-Frozen, which is being followed before the National Court. One of the people investigated, different from the one who discovered the illegal beacons, was Borja Villacís, murdered last June. The brigadier said the woman who recorded him, with whom he had a budding relationship, was an infiltrator for drug traffickers. He also said that he knew it and everything he said was because he was pretending.
The brigadier and his superior, now a captain, denied in a report that their subordinates used illegal beacons, arguing that the practice is prohibited. Subsequent research refutes this defense thesis. A national police team stationed at the National Court followed the trail of the two beacons. Meticulous reconstruction work made it possible to link the Civil Guards to the places where the beacon cards were purchased and activated, the location of which the brigade and the head of the Team had denied in a letter sent to the court last fall.
In 2020, four of the six indicted agents put their signature and professional license number on the two reports that were used to accuse the government delegate in Madrid, José Manuel Franco, and to also target several government ministers and the epidemiologist Fernando Simon. who acted as spokesperson for the Ministry of Health during the pandemic. Civil Guard sources assure that the entire economic crimes team participated in this investigation, called Operation Sanitary.
