A Madrid judge has cited six agents from the Economic Crimes Team of the Civil Guard in Madrid as being investigated, the same group that instructed the reports with falsehoods, hoaxes and ideological bias that held the central government responsible for contributing to the spread of the epidemic. of Covid-19 through the authorization of the feminist march on March 8, 2020.
The current investigation, which until now had been limited to the number two of the Team, now extends to five other agents, all of them accused of placing beacons without judicial authorization in the framework of a drug trafficking investigation. The six civil guards will give a statement on November 25 before the Court of Instruction number 54 of Madrid, sources in the case have told elDiario.es.
The agents are accused of an alleged crime against privacy for having placed two tracking devices without authorization on the car and motorcycle of one of their targets, an alleged drug trafficker whom they later investigated in the National Court.
In 2020, four of the six agents now charged signed their signature and their professional license number on the two reports that served to accuse the Government delegate in Madrid, José Manuel Franco, and also to target several Government ministers and the epidemiologist. Fernando Simón, who acted as spokesperson for the Ministry of Health during the pandemic. Sources from the Civil Guard assure that the entire Economic Crimes Team participated in that investigation, baptized as Operation Sanitary.
The content of those police reports represented a political earthquake regarding the management of the worst tragedy that occurred in Spain since the Civil War. Its lack of reliability ultimately caused the case to be archived by the judge.
In the reports, mantras from the extreme right were reproduced with statements such as the following: “The Government knew the real danger of the coronavirus (…) in a video at the head of the March 8 demonstration, Minister Celaá can be seen already the former minister Valerio wearing latex gloves and in which a voice can be heard warning ‘No kissing, no kissing’ to the people leading the demonstration.”
Purple gloves are a symbol of feminism in that and other demonstrations and did not serve as protection because the majority of attendees carried them in one hand. The ‘no kissing’ did not prove that the Government handled information about the risk of the virus under secrecy. At that time, official instructions had already been issued to avoid physical contact as much as possible. The list of hoaxes and misrepresentations in the reports is extensive [se puede leer aquí].
The Government dismissed the colonel in charge of the Madrid Command, Diego Pérez de los Cobos, for not informing his superiors of the progress of the investigations, but had to reinstate him by court order. The only internal investigation that was ordered was for the leak of the reports and a military court annulled the sanction against the guards.
The majority of the participants in the reports with hoaxes and misrepresentations remained in their positions, including their boss, who was later promoted to captain and has come to act as accidental head of the entire Judicial Police specialty of the Community Command. from Madrid. Unlike his subordinates, the captain has not been charged in the beacon case.
Only the brigadier charged in September 2023 was transferred to bureaucratic tasks of the Command and today he is assigned to the Civil Guard Academy of Baeza (Jaén) where he instructs future agents. His file is detained pending a final judicial resolution.
“I am the most illegal of the illegals”
In a recording published in September 2023, that brigade, number two of the civil guard team, confesses the irregularities that he and his colleagues commit in several cases assigned to them, according to elDiario.es. “That beacon is illegal. “I am the most illegal of illegals,” he goes so far as to say. The recording ultimately represented the first of the charges for illegal beacons, the use of which the brigade recognized in the audio. Its content was contributed to the drug trafficking case by one of the defense lawyers.
The alleged cocaine trafficking organization was the target of the civil guards within the framework of an operation called Águila-Frozen, which is being followed in the National Court. One of those investigated, different from the one who discovered the illegal beacons, was Borja Villacís, murdered last June. The brigadier declared that the woman who recorded him, with whom he had an incipient relationship, was an infiltrator for drug traffickers. He also said that he knew it and that 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 this practice is prohibited. Subsequent research refutes this defense thesis. A team of national police stationed at the National Court has followed the trail of the two beacons. A meticulous reconstruction work has made it possible to link the civil guards with the places where the beacon cards were purchased and activated, the placement 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 has not been successful, as it is associated with a French company that has refused to collaborate. But the other device had a different operation, with two SIM cards: the one carried by the device itself and another that is inserted into a phone and that 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 within the framework of a separate piece. Next, the judge ordered the National Police to investigate and the result is a report delivered to the magistrate, to which elDiario.es has had access, in which it is proven that the illegal beacons were acquired, placed and used by at least six members of the Economic and Technological Crimes Team of the Civil Guard in Madrid.
The judge of the National Court Santiago Pedraz has recused himself in favor of a local court and now the head of Court 51 of Madrid, Marta Guitérrez del Olmo, has cited the six agents as defendants.
For the LAV R agent, the agents have found “20 positions that could be in common with the beacon.” After first RCD A, a total of 25 matches. Another 29 to the JAGP guard. In the case of brigade Sergio B, “seven common areas” have been detected. The AG C guard was in the same area of the investigated SIMs 26 times and the ECS agent on eight occasions.
The civil guards used the identity of a person who had lost his ID to acquire the SIM cards that they placed in the beacon and in the mobile phone linked to it. Through the positioning of the guards’ cell phones, the national police have managed to place them “in the area, day and time, of the day and place of purchase and activation of the SIM”, according to the report that gave rise to their accusation. .
The investigated agents 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 alleged movements of the civil guards to monitor the target that they later linked to the drug trafficking organization.
In the case of 8M, only the brigadier took statements from six witnesses, three union members and three officials from the Government Delegation, and signed those testimonies with the number of his Professional Identification Card as instructor of the proceedings. The 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 mass march took place. Nor did it affect the thesis of the two reports from the Civil Guard that sought to incriminate the Government.
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