11 of the 14 Pakistanis detained on Tuesday by agents of the National Police in a macro operation in six provinces against radical Islam have entered a Foreigners Internment Center (CIE) to proceed with their expulsion in the coming days without waiting to be courts, as sources from the Ministry of the Interior have confirmed to EL PAÍS. The other three arrested have been released. All of them were accused of allegedly being part of the structure in Spain of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a radical Islamist party with parliamentary representation in the Asian country that advocates implementing Islamic law and executing anyone it considers blasphemous. .
The refusal to pursue criminal proceedings against them and give priority to their expulsion is based on article 57 of the Immigration Law, which contemplates the possibility that a judge, after listening to the Prosecutor’s Office, authorizes this measure if the person under investigation is accused. of a crime whose maximum penalty does not exceed six years in prison. This is the case of those arrested last Tuesday in Operation Sakina 2 of the General Information Commissariat (CGI), whom the police accuse of carrying out acts of indoctrination, apology and terrorist glorification, as detailed by Interior in a note made public this Thursday.
The decision is also made after five other alleged members of the TLP who were arrested and imprisoned in February last year initially accused of terrorism were provisionally released by the National Court after the judicial investigation reduced the accusation against them. to an alleged crime of exaltation, which is punishable with lesser penalties (one to three years in prison). His defense lawyer had provided the case with a letter from the Pakistani embassy in Madrid certifying that the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan is “legal” in the Asian country and “participates in electoral processes.” The Prosecutor’s Office also confirmed then that this group is not on the list of terrorist organizations of the EU or any other transnational entity. The Police highlight in their note this Thursday that this organization makes “an intolerant and violent interpretation of religion.”
The measure of expelling a detainee for radical Islam instead of waiting for him to be tried is not new, but in recent years it has been raised more frequently, especially in cases of self-indoctrination, a crime incorporated into the Penal Code. in 2015 whose difficulty in proving in a trial has led in recent years to acquittals or convictions that are later revoked in the second instance by the courts. This has led the National and Interior Court to explore this other route, which, being an administrative process left in the hands of the Secretary of State for Security, allows individuals who, allegedly, pose a potential threat to security to be quickly expelled from Spain. national. The Criminal Chamber of the National Court has already ruled in several cases in favor of this measure and has endorsed the system.
Investigated since 2020
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The investigation that led first to the five arrests in February 2022 and now to the 14 arrests last Tuesday began after the attack committed, in September 2020, next to the former Paris headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine that had already suffered a jihadist attack in January 2015 in which eight of its collaborators died. In that second attack, in which two people were seriously injured, Zaheer Hassan Mahmoud, a 25-year-old Pakistani, was arrested and assured that his intention was to attack the publication again for its decision to redistribute the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. . The French police investigation found links between Zaheer Hassan Mahmood and the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan.
That arrest triggered the alert among Spanish anti-terrorist experts due to the fear of being faced with a new terrorist phenomenon, especially after learning that the detainee had maintained contacts with a compatriot settled in Barcelona. The investigations that began then led the Police to the first five detainees, who were arrested after allegedly publishing on the social networks Tik Tok, Facebook and Instagram videos with fragments of the radical speeches of leaders of the party that, in 2018, removed thousands of people took to the streets in Lahore to ensure that Asia Bibi, the Christian sentenced to death for insulting Muhammad, was hanged.
After those arrests, the Police continued the investigations into the possible presence in Spain of other alleged members of the party after finding in the records a document written in Urdu (the language spoken in Pakistan) that contained a list with names, telephone numbers and positions. of the supposed 15 main people responsible for the TLP in Spain. Those investigations led last Tuesday to the arrest of seven people in Barcelona, two in Gipuzkoa, another two in Valencia, one in Álava, another in Lleida and the last in La Rioja. 11 of them are now waiting at a CIE for their expulsion from Spain to materialize.
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