The Criminal Chamber of the National Court has agreed to order the carrying out of pending proceedings in the investigation against Carmelo Ovono Obiang, one of the sons of the president of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, for the alleged kidnapping and torture of four resident Guinean opponents. in Spain, one of whom died in unclear circumstances. Judge Santiago Pedraz, investigator of the case, had refused to carry them out, invoking the lack of jurisdiction to continue with the case and agreed to conclude the summary without prosecuting any of those investigated.
The order of the Second Section of the National Court, signed by María Teresa García, Fernando Andreu and Joaquín Delgado represents a new setback against Pedraz, who closed the case last week when numerous tests remain pending, procedures that he himself had agreed to, and without mentioning in his record the existence of this appeal pending resolution.
The investigating judge shelved his investigation by insisting on the argument that the justice of Equatorial Guinea is competent to investigate the facts, a thesis that had already been revoked by the magistrates of the Second Section with whom he has been in conflict since this began. investigation for crimes of terrorism and crimes against humanity against Obiang's son, the Minister of the Interior and the Director General of Security. Now, once the higher hierarchical body forces him to carry out the pending proceedings, Pedraz has two options left: revoke his order of conclusion of the summary to comply with the mandate of the Chamber and be able to carry them out or wait for the Third Section to return the summary, according to legal sources.
The Criminal Chamber has so far supported all appeals and complaints presented by the representation of the victims and the prosecutor Vicente González Mota. And his magistrates have revoked Pedraz's orders. The last one, by annulling the judge's decision to cede jurisdiction of the case to Equatorial Guinea and reminding him that, in any case, the only one competent to make that decision would be the Chamber itself. In his order, the three magistrates reproached the instructor that “it is difficult to cede something that is lacking,” since jurisdiction could only be ceded within the framework of an international treaty that Spain does not have with that country.
But this call of attention did not stop Pedraz and, in his recent order concluding the summary, he maintained his arguments in favor of the jurisdiction of Equatorial Guinea, despite the absence of guarantees in a country whose highest judicial authority is the dictator himself. who is also the father of the main investigator. The Supreme Court of the former Spanish colony assures that it has opened an investigation into the same events and maintains that jurisdiction of the case corresponds to its courts. A trick that he already used without success in the so-called judgment of ill-acquired assets that brought Teodorín Obiang, the country's vice president and another of the autocrat's sons, to the dock in France, for whom he was sentenced in absentia to three years in prison for laundering tens of millions.
Tests pending practice
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The order of the Criminal Court, to which EL PAÍS has had access, forces Pedraz to carry out numerous pending proceedings. Among others, statements from protected witnesses and the former UN rapporteur against torture Manfred Novack, rogatory commissions to several countries, police reports on the identity of the pilots of Obiang's presidential plane that was allegedly used to transfer from South Sudan to Malabo to the four kidnapped people, or the monitoring of Carmelo Ovono Obiang's million-dollar accounts in Spain. Also, his connection with the 17 detectives who spied on the kidnapped people in Madrid. And that they were hired by a senior security official in Equatorial Guinea identified by the Police.
Pedraz has refused on several occasions to issue a search and arrest warrant against those investigated and it had to be the Criminal Chamber that forced the court to adopt that measure, a requirement that has been in force for several weeks. Two years ago, the judge gave up arresting Carmelo Ovono Obiang, the main investigator, when the Police informed him that he was sleeping in a hotel in Madrid. Two weeks earlier he had issued a resolution in which he requested his arrest and appearance in the National Court court, as well as the seizure of his mobile phone and electronic devices. The magistrate has not explained this change of attitude in his record. The defense of the three investigated is carried out by Javier Gómez Bermúdez, former judge of the National Court and former colleague of the investigator of the case.
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