The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office has requested five years in prison for retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo and three years in prison for journalists Alberto Pozas and Luis Rendueles for their alleged involvement in the Dina case. The public ministry, which attributes crimes of discovery and disclosure of secrets to them, thus materializes the accusation against the three defendants for this derived from the Villarejo casein which it has been investigated how the contents of the mobile phone of Dina Bousselham, a former advisor to Pablo Iglesias (former secretary general of Podemos and former vice president of the Government), ended up in Villarejo’s possession after she reported the theft at the end of 2015. A part of the device files was also published in various media.
The movement of the accusations occurs after, at the beginning of October, the Criminal Chamber of the National Court confirmed the proposal of the investigating judge Manuel García-Castellón to seat the three on the bench. As EL PAÍS reported this Friday, Pablo Iglesias and Dina Bousselham, appearing as victims in the case, have requested up to four years in prison for Villarejo, Pozas and Rendueles, from whom they also demand compensation for “moral damages, losses, inconvenience and suffering caused.”
The beginning of the plot of Dina case It dates back to November 2015, when Bousselham and her boyfriend, Ricardo de Sa Ferreira, were in a shopping center in Alcorcón (Madrid). At the time, Iglesias had just left his position as an MEP, where Bousselham worked as his advisor. According to the couple’s story, while they were shopping, someone stole a coat in which, among other objects, they kept her cell phone. Subsequently, starting in mid-2016, several media outlets began publishing some of the material she stored on the phone. And, after Villarejo’s arrest at the end of 2017, the Police Internal Affairs Unit found in the possession of the corrupt agent a hard drive and two pendrives with copies of the mobile content.
“One or several individuals surreptitiously seized the personal effects of Bousselham and his then partner,” say prosecutors Miguel Serrano and César de Rivas. In its indictment, to which EL PAÍS has had access, the public ministry highlights how, just two months later, an “unidentified person” delivered a storage card — which contained the advisor’s mobile files — to the headquarters. of the Zeta group, editor of the extinct magazine Interview. Two of its journalists (Pozas, director of the publication, and Rendueles) examined the content, which they communicated to the group’s president, Antonio Asensio, who decided that nothing would be published.
However, Alberto Pozas and Luis Rendueles “had made a complete copy” of the material, the accusation adds. And, “on later, unspecified dates,” they gave a copy to Villarejo, “whom they usually treated as one of their sources of information.” During the judicial investigation phase, the reporters stated that the commissioner contacted them and “required” a copy, which they gave him when they understood that the request “came from a senior police official” and they assumed that “the use that was made of it would be a legitimate police use.”
What affects the most is what happens closest. So you don’t miss anything, subscribe.
Subscribe
“Pozas and Rendueles knew that the storage card they gave to Villarejo contained files with internal Podemos documents, various bank details, video and audio files, and other documents with files of an intimate and personal nature. Among them, photographs of Bousselham half-naked, and various Telegram chat groups in which other members of the leadership of the aforementioned political party were registered,” Anticorrupción clarifies. The prosecutors add that, Villarejo then handed over all this material “to journalists in his trusted circle so that they could prepare and publish various information to the discredit of Podemos and the then general secretary, Pablo Iglesias.”
In the list of news under suspicion, allegedly prepared with information from that stolen phone, the public ministry lists information published on the web Okdiario and for the newspaper The confidential.
In their accusation documents, Iglesias and Bousselham already pointed out that there are indications that Villarejo directed a “criminal organization”, which received orders from different “persons”, “entities” and “political parties” to carry out “acts of espionage and campaigns of partisan discredit.” “In this case, the theft of the mobile terminal and the circulation of its content had the clear objective of harming Iglesias and Podemos, publishing the content of his personal conversations, as well as documentation relating to the party of which he was general secretary, using to do so from the media and counting on a large network of professionals with whom he met regularly,” continues the indictment of the former vice president of the Government, which considers the participation of the “media leg” in the plot to be key: “Necessary to carry out, on an indirect basis, information poisoning campaigns.”
Anti-corruption also requests that the three accused compensate Bousselham with 5,000 euros; and Pablo Iglesias with 1,000 euros. The public ministry adds that, for the payment of said amounts, “the General Administration of the State will be subsidiarily responsible.”
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#Anticorruption #requests #years #prison #Villarejo #years #journalists #Dina #case