Pompeyo González, 75 years old, appeared this Thursday at the National Court as a retiree who is fond of DIY and “marquetry”. “Yes, I usually make things at home for myself and someone I know.” “I also like aviation: I have a drone, and I take photos and videos,” he assured the court that has been trying him since Monday for sending six inflammatory letters in 2022 to, among others, the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez. , and the Ukrainian and US embassies in Madrid. The Prosecutor’s Office (which asks for 22 years in prison for him for terrorism crimes) and the Police point this out unequivocally in the face of the trail of evidence accumulated against him – such as the material seized at his home, the information queries he made on the web and the traces of DNA found on the packages—but he denies the prosecution’s thesis. As he has argued, he did not manufacture the devices: someone must have gone through his trash, collected the envelopes and other remains, and used them to make the pyrotechnic devices sent.
“I blame it on the fact that I threw it away… And there are people who go to the bins to pick it up… They appear in my mailbox [sobres] open from time to time. Since then, I have the receipts online. I even get empty Amazon packages,” González said during his interrogation as the accused. It was then that the prosecutor asked him for an explanation for the searches he did on the Internet about, among other matters, “package bombs”; “how much does a liter of uranium weigh”; “if gunpowder is wrapped with nails it can explode”; “learn Russian in 10 days” and “where tanks are made in Spain”. “You get a lot of things! When you search for ‘flares’, you get many things… You search for ‘flares’ and you get package bombs, and even how the atomic bomb is made. One asks: ‘I want to learn how to make a sparkler’; and then links appear… and one ends in ‘missiles’ or what do I know. “It’s not that I looked for it on purpose.”
The Prosecutor’s Office maintains that Pompeyo González, a retired official from the Vitoria City Council and resident in Miranda de Ebro (Burgos), prepared and sent these packages with pyrotechnic material as a sign of rejection of the support that Spain provided to Ukraine after the invasion launched by the Kremlin. “The objective was to influence Spain’s position on Ukraine,” says the Police, who arrested him on January 25, 2023, after tracking him for two months. The investigations had begun on November 30, 2022, when one of the incendiary devices exploded at the Ukrainian embassy, causing injuries to the security guard. Only a few days before, another package addressed to the President of the Government had been received in La Moncloa. And other similar ones — which contained “hand-made wooden boxes” with a “homemade” pyrotechnic device inside, according to the summary — also arrived at the Ministry of Defense, the US embassy, the arms company Instalaza — manufacturer of the C-90 grenade launchers that Spain sent as part of military aid to Ukraine—and to the Satellite Center at the Torrejón de Ardoz air base, in Madrid.
—Have you had any interest in altering public peace in Spain? —His lawyer asked the retiree.
—That doesn’t even occur to me. The press has invented that—he has avoided it.
What affects the most is what happens closest. So you don’t miss anything, subscribe.
Subscribe
—Have you had the intention of destabilizing the democratic system?
—No such nonsense has ever occurred to me.
González already advanced on Tuesday what his line of defense would be: denying the accusations. “I’m innocent. Let’s hope that justice is done,” he said as he left the court to the journalists stationed in front of the National Court. Since his arrest on January 25, 2023, the retiree has always repeated that he had nothing to do with sending the inflammatory letters. In fact, one of the police officers told the judges that, when they stopped him and restrained him in the middle of the street, he seemed very calm and commented: “You’re confused, I’m a person who likes marquetry.”
Those words are not trivial. Among the evidence collected against him, all the material seized during the search of his home stands out, which includes “several cylindrical rods that may correspond to the same type of cylinders that housed the incendiary piston of the homemade devices inside; different screws along with springs, similar to the firing pin that was used in the devices; and drills with precision drill bits similar to those used for its production,” according to the investigating judge José Luis Calama. “His home practically looked like a workshop,” summarized a police officer who participated in the investigations.
They are not the only indications. “The shaper I had caught my attention, in which the Tedax (Explosive Ordnance Disposal Specialist Technicians) found a brown substance that matched what was found in the devices,” an investigator specified last Monday, when he testified in court. to explain how the investigations were developed. During the surveillance they carried out on González before his arrest (which included searching for evidence among the trash he threw away), they also found “256 scratched matches”: “And the match head, according to the Tedax, is what it was made of.” the device,” a police officer stressed.
This Thursday, when testifying before the court, the septuagenarian has downplayed all the intercepted material, and has alleged that he acquired it for other purposes. Did you buy the envelopes? “Yes, to package some postcards, but in the end I threw them all into a container near my house.” And the hinges? “They were for some closets.” And the drill bits? “Also. “I make things for myself at home and I was making a helipad for the drone.” And the matches? “I was preparing a flare for the drone, to raise it 500 meters and lower it [con ellas encendidas]”. And the golden copper tubes? “That was for the helipad for the drone. For the legs [del helipuerto]”. And the large nails? “I had to go to town to nail them because there are some beams that are bad,” she defended herself.
Antonio Guerrero, lawyer for the Association of Victims of Terrorism (AVT), appearing as a popular accusation, has refuted him: “There is abundant circumstantial evidence that would prove participation in the events. The evidence that exists proves proven without any doubt that the accused is the author of the events. DNA tests prove that he is the author: there are genetic remains in the seals of the packages sent, and on the surface of the artifacts. “It’s not just that he tried to disturb the public peace, it’s that he succeeded,” the prosecutor stressed.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#defense #accused #sending #pyrotechnic #letters #Government #search #flares #Internet #package #bombs