Lieutenant Colonel David Oliva and two lieutenants under his command during the special anti-drug operation in the Strait of Gibraltar, now defunct OCON-Sur, will be tried by a jury court if the Madrid court supports the decision adopted by a judge in He speaks of the execution of the latest procedures requested by those investigated.
Last July, the preliminary hearing was held against the former head of the special anti-drug unit of the Civil Guard of the Strait of Gibraltar and two of his subordinates, accused of one crime of revealing secrets and another of corruption. The investigating judge has just rejected the penultimate possibility for the accused to avoid trial, rejecting the practice of new procedures that he had requested during the holding of this hearing, judicial sources informed elDiario.es.
At that time, the defense of the accused presented a battery of more than forty procedures with which it intended to demonstrate that the reports of the National Police and the Interior Affairs were a setup to incriminate them. The president of the Instruction Court number 5 of Parla, Nerea Rodríguez, rejected their practice, alleging that it is not the appropriate procedural moment and that, if they are agreed, they must be practiced during the trial.
The appeal of Colonel David Oliva and the two lieutenants investigated before the highest court, the Provincial Court of Madrid, will not be resolved for five months. In the event that the judges of the Court support the decision of the investigator, the next step in the case will be the trial. The law stipulates that accusations of corruption against public officials must be tried by a jury court. The case was investigated in Parla due to the location of the Internal Affairs Service, in the Valdemoro barracks, where the crime of revealing secrets allegedly took place.
The charges are based on the fact that David Oliva wanted to know about the internal investigation that was being conducted against him for his alleged relationship with a family of drug traffickers and that for this purpose he had promised and obtained a better-paid position at OCON-Sur for a member of the Internal Affairs, the service that conducted the investigations. In exchange for the new destination, the Internal Affairs lieutenant would have to extract the information against Oliva and the third accused from the server. Hence the accusation of revealing secrets and corruption.
They denounce a setup
The Internal Affairs investigation that Oliva wanted to know about had started from a report by the Police Unit for Crime and Organized Crime (UDYCO). When the Civil Guards had access to the report, they launched a “counter-investigation” that concluded that the report was full of unproven accusations, non-existent follow-ups, inexplicable errors and false conclusions.
With this expertise, the Civil Guards filed a complaint before a Madrid court which was dismissed on the grounds that the events are part of a “living” process and that it is in this process that they must be resolved.
The three commanders had tried to have the National Court investigating the Ariza clan, with which they allegedly had relations, call the authors of the reports they consider false, but the case was closed due to interference in the Ariza clan’s relations. The Civil Guards allegedly collaborated with drug traffickers in the investigation and their claim was rejected.
Until its dissolution in September 2022, Lieutenant Colonel Oliva was head of the Southern Drug Trafficking Coordination Body (OCON), an organisation created by the Ministry of the Interior in 2018 to deal with the threat of drug trafficking clans in the Campo de Gibraltar.
During his mission as head of OCON-Sur, David Oliva suspected that he and a lieutenant under his command were being investigated by their colleagues in the Internal Affairs Service. For this reason, and according to the prosecution, Oliva offered a position within OCON to a third commander, assigned to Internal Affairs, in exchange for providing the information that the SAI had on him.
This lieutenant ended up providing the information to Oliva, according to the investigation, and that is why he is the third accused in this case. According to the Internal Affairs, the lieutenant would obtain a position that would cost him more than 2,000 euros extra per month and in a position that he coveted for family reasons.
A first phase of the operation was carried out at the end of 2022. In it, a statement was collected from the former Internal Affairs agent who went to work for Oliva and allegedly committed the crime of revealing secrets. At that time, WhatsApp was seized that would prove the maneuvers of the lieutenant colonel, former head of OCON, according to the Internal Affairs.
“This is Operation Boomerang.”
On January 18, between 8:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., the Internal Affairs agent extracted data from the Internal Affairs server and created the folder “VAREA_Algeciras” on a Toshiba brand USB drive that he wrapped with a small piece of electrical tape.
The same day, Oliva wrote to the lieutenant again: “How are you doing your homework?” The Civil Guard’s anti-drug chief immediately received a reply: “Good morning, Commander: Done.” On January 27, the lieutenant returned to his post in Campo de Gibraltar and five days later he handed over the aforementioned USB stick to his new boss, then Commander Oliva.
“Hand in your homework. This is Operation Boomerang” is another of the seized messages that Home Affairs presented in its report. The accused claim that the ISC took their content out of context and manipulated it to support its accusation.
In September 2022, the Ministry of the Interior announced that it had decided to restructure OCON-Sur and relocate the 150 agents it had assigned to the system on secondment to the different commands of Andalusia, that is, temporarily. The decision was announced as a new phase in the fight against “narcotics” in the region, but then the Interior Affairs followed in Oliva’s footsteps. The lieutenant colonel was born in Algeciras and has been decorated in different positions he has held, almost always in the fight against drug trafficking.
Sources close to the accused assure that OCON-Sur had become a source of confrontation between different structures of the Civil Guard and that the supplements that its members received had aroused suspicion among their colleagues. Other sources suggest that Oliva’s successes in drug seizures and his methods – a great capacity for work for some, acting on the edge of the law for others – had earned him enmity within the Civil Guard and the National Police.
