The Government plans to lift this Monday the secret of the record of visits by agents of the National Intelligence Center (CNI) to the imam of Ripoll (Girona), Abdelbaki Es Satty, considered the mastermind of the jihadist attacks of August 17, 2017 on Las Ramblas in Barcelona and in Cambrils (Tarragona).
As reported by SER and Defense sources have confirmed, this is one of the issues that will be discussed at the meeting of the Council of Ministers. after Junts agreed with the PSOE on declassification of several documents related to said attacks.
Specifically, this Monday it is expected that all those claimed by the investigation commission of these will be declassified. attacks on the Congress of Deputies.
The Government plans to declassify, among other documents, the registry of the visits that Es Satty received in the Castellón prison by CNI agents.
In said parliamentary commission, the former director of the CNI Félix Sanz Roldán confirmed that CNI agents visited Es Satty on several occasions – “two times or at most three, it could be four, I don’t know” – in the Castellón prison, where he served time for drug trafficking crimes between 2012 and 2014, a period in which he also had encounters with civil guards.
Regarding these interviews, he explained that they were part of the fight against radicalization and proxelitism that it was suspected that it could be taking place in mosques and prisons, but that does not mean that they were appointments with a confidant.
In fact, he flatly denied that the imam, who died in the explosion in the Alcanar villa (Tarragona) – where the jihadist cell was preparing explosives – on August 16, 2017, one day before the Las Ramblas attackwas a confidant of the CNI, although he did not reveal whether once he was released from prison agents from the National Intelligence Center continued to meet with him.
The person who was the head of the CNI for a decade, between 2009 and 2019, and four legislatures (two with PP governments and the same number with the PSOE) assured that the National Intelligence Center He had no prior information before these attacks were committed.
“Does anyone really believe that an attack could have been prevented and was not done?” he replied to the Junts deputy Pilar Calvo, the party that together with ERC promoted this investigative commission.
“If anyone thinks or imagines that we could have prevented the death of 16 people and we did not do so, it is an infamy and I am not saying this only because of my quality in the CNI,” Sanz Roldán emphasized before explaining that When an attack is perpetrated it is because the adversary “had more capacity” than the security forces and the intelligence service to avoid and prevent it.
In this line he charged, although without naming it, against the conspiracy theory and stressed that it is impossible that all institutions, including the Supreme Court, could have generated a different story from what is said to have happened. “And no element will be found because it did not exist,” settled.
In 2023, the Supreme Court confirmed the sentences of 43 and 36 years in prison imposed by the National Court on the two main defendants for these attacks, Driss Oukabir and Mohamed Houli, which caused 16 deaths and 140 injuries.
It only partially upheld the appeal of the third party involved, Said Ben Iazza, to whom it reduced its sentence of 8 years to 18 months in prison because there were reasonable doubts that he knew in sufficient detail that, with his actions, he was collaborating with the terrorist organization.
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