A Madrid judge cited six agents from the Madrid Civil Guard’s economic crimes team as under investigation, the same group that loaded the reports with lies, hoaxes and ideological bias that held the central government responsible for its contribution to the spread of the epidemic. . of Covid-19 through the authorization of the feminist march of March 8, 2020.
The ongoing investigation, which until now was limited to the number two of the Team, now extends to five other agents, all accused of having installed beacons without judicial authorization as part of an investigation into drug trafficking . The six civil guards will make a statement on November 25 before the Court of Instruction number 54 in Madrid, the sources in the file told elDiario.es.
The officers are accused of an alleged privacy offense for allegedly placing two tracking devices on the car and motorcycle of one of their targets, a suspected drug trafficker who they later investigated in court, without authorization. national.
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 María 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 Sanitary Operation.
The content of these police reports represented a political earthquake in the handling of Spain’s worst tragedy since the civil war. Its unreliability ultimately led the file to be archived by the judge.
In the reports, far-right mantras were reproduced with statements such as these: “The government knew the real danger of the coronavirus (…) in a video leading the March 8 demonstration, Minister Celaá can be seen already former Minister Valerio wearing latex gloves and in which a voice can be heard warning “No kiss, no kiss” to the people leading the demonstration.
Purple gloves are a symbol of feminism in this and other protests and did not serve as protection as the majority of participants wore them in one hand. The “no kiss” does not prove that the government handled information about the risk of the virus in secret. At that time, official instructions had already been issued to avoid physical contact as much as possible. The list of hoaxes and misrepresentations in reporting is long [se puede leer aquí].
The government fired the colonel in charge of the Madrid command, Diego Pérez de los Cobos, for not informing his superiors about the progress of the investigation, but had to reinstate him by court decision. The only internal investigation that was ordered concerned the leak of the reports, and a military court overturned the sanction against the guards.
The majority of participants in the reports containing hoaxes and false statements remained in their positions, including their boss, who was later promoted to captain and by chance became head of the entire judicial police specialty of the Madrid Community Command. Unlike his subordinates, the captain was not charged in the beacon affair.
Only the brigadier indicted in September 2023 was transferred to the bureaucratic tasks of the Command and today he is assigned to the Civil Guard Academy of Baeza (Jaén) where he instructs future agents. His case is being held pending a final legal resolution.
“I am the most illegal of illegal immigrants”
In a recording published in September 2023, this brigade, number two of the Civil Guard team, confesses to the irregularities that he and his colleagues commit in several cases entrusted to them, according to 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.
The study of one of the beacons was unsuccessful, because it is associated with a French company which refused to collaborate. But the other device had a different operation, with two SIM cards: the one carried by the device itself and another which is inserted into a telephone and which receives the positioning of the first.
A secret investigation into the guards
Judge Pedraz took the woman who recorded the audio as a witness and charged the brigadier in a separate exhibit. Then the judge ordered the National Police to investigate and the result is a report given to the magistrate, to which elDiario.es had access, in which it is proven that the illegal tags were acquired, placed and used by at least six members. of the Economic and Technological Crime Team of the Civil Guard of Madrid.
National Court judge Santiago Pedraz recused himself in favor of a local court and now the president of Court 51 of Madrid, Marta Guitérrez del Olmo, named the six agents as defendants.
For the LAV R agent, the agents found “20 positions which could be common with the beacon”. After the first RCD A, a total of 25 matches. 29 others in JAGP custody. In the case of the Sergio B brigade, “seven common areas” were detected. Guard AG C was in the same area as the SIMs investigated 26 times and the ECS agent eight times.
The Civil Guards used the identity of a person who had lost their identity card to acquire the SIM cards which they placed in the beacon and in the mobile phone linked to it. Thanks to the positioning of the guards’ cell phones, the National Police managed to place them “in the area, day and time, of the day and place of purchase and activation of the SIM card”, according to the report which gave grounds for their accusation.
The agents investigated also appear at the place and time where the terminal that “commands” the beacon is located and in accommodations close to where the device moves, also coinciding with the alleged movements of the civil guards to monitor the target which they then linked to the drug trafficking organization.
In the case of 8M, only the brigadier took the statements of six witnesses, three trade unionists and three officials of the Government Delegation, and signed these statements with the number of his professional identity card as instructor of the procedure . The trade unionists explained that they had not been warned by the government delegation of any risk and the officials explained that they had no real knowledge of it until March 11, three days after the march. mass. Nor did it affect the thesis of the two Civil Guard reports that sought to incriminate the government.
