Five of the six civil guards accused of buying and using illegal beacons in a drug trafficking investigation have requested this Monday before the judge investigating them to be defended by the State Attorney’s Office. The five agents, plus the brigadier who acted as their boss, were summoned before the head of the Court of Instruction number 54 of Madrid to declare that they were being investigated for a crime against privacy, but the magistrate, at the request of those five defendants, has his statement has been postponed, legal sources report.
The sixth investigated, a brigadier who was in charge of the rest of the accused in the Economic Crime Team of the Civil Guard in Madrid, has refused to answer the questions that the private accusations, the Prosecutor’s Office or the magistrate could ask him. His lawyer, who represents only the brigade, has not asked him questions, the same sources specify. This brigade has been charged since September of last year after confessing in a recording to the fraudulent use of tracking beacons.
The State Attorney’s Office is not obliged to defend all officials accused of crimes committed in the exercise of their functions and before making a decision it evaluates the type of crime being investigated and the possible damage to the State Administration itself.
The six investigated belong to the Civil Guard team that prepared the reports that tried to blame the central government for the spread of the Covid-19 epidemic in 2020 for authorizing a feminist march. The Government delegate in Madrid, José Manuel Franco, was accused in the case, but the judge ended up shelving it.
The six agents are accused of an alleged crime against privacy for their actions in a case other than that of 8M, in which they must answer for having placed two tracking devices without authorization on the car and motorcycle of one of their targets, a alleged drug trafficker who was later investigated in the National Court.
In a recording published in September 2023, the investigated brigade confesses to the irregularities that he and his colleagues commit in several cases assigned to them, as reported by 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.
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.
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