Justice has declared firm the acquittal of retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, his wife Gemma Alcalá and journalist Carlos Mier in the case of recording members of the National Intelligence Center. The Court of Madrid communicated to the three acquitted the definitive nature of their exoneration after neither the Prosecutor’s Office nor any accusation filed an appeal against the sentence that declared it proven that someone irregularly registered a meeting between members of the CNI and the Police in the framework of the investigation to little Nicolás, but that there is no evidence that Villarejo was behind the recording or its subsequent dissemination.
Justice acquits Villarejo in the case for the illegal recording of members of the CNI
Further
The Prosecutor’s Office, which came to request four years in prison for the main defendant in the Tandem case and three for the other two defendants, renounced taking the case before higher instances without the State Attorney’s Office, Podemos or the rest of the accusations presenting any appeal. against the exoneration of the three, accused at the time of revealing official secrets. The firmness was declared at the end of February but has not been notified until after the middle of March.
The three sat on the bench of the Provincial Court of Madrid accused of preparing and recording a confidential meeting between CNI spies and members of the judicial commission that was investigating the case of Francisco Nicolás Gómez Iglesias with the aim of disseminating it and provoking nullity of at least part of the case. The meeting took place at the end of 2014, was recorded and its content disseminated by various media.
The acquittal, now declared final as elDiario.es has learned, understood that no evidence allowed linking this recording with Villarejo and his wife, who was then in charge of a web page called Sensitive Information linked to the commissioner and where the journalist Carlos Mier worked. , the first means of communication that echoed the arrest of the young Gómez Iglesias.
According to the Prosecutor’s Office and the accusations, the journalist made a call to one of the police commanders present at the meeting, which activated some type of software that allowed the conversation to be recorded. The sentence, however, left in writing that “unexplained doubts persist regarding how the recording was made and regarding the content of the call” made by the journalist in charge of the police, doubts that “introduce not unreasonable alternatives to the thesis of the accusation”.
The finality of this acquittal comes after last year a criminal court in the capital decided to acquit José Manuel Villarejo of the accusations that the former director of the CNI, Félix Sanz Roldán, of libel and false denunciation. It also comes after last September his first major trial in the framework of the Tandem case was seen for sentencing at the National Court.
A triple trial in which the retired commissioner is accused in three of the main pieces of the case that began with his arrest and imprisonment in November 2017. A process that lasted a year in the halls of the Criminal Chamber and in which Villarejo is accused of using his position and contacts in the Police to collect private commissions from businessmen to spy on rivals. The Prosecutor’s Office, in total, requests 80 years in prison for his alleged participation in the projects known as Iron, Land and Painter.
The first piece investigated whether Villarejo was hired by a law firm to spy on a rival law firm. The second, the role he played in the family war of the heirs of Luis García-Cereceda. The third, the commission recognized by Juan Muñoz Tamara himself, husband of the journalist Ana Rosa Quintana, to obtain data from a former partner who owed him money. There are still more than 30 pieces in the investigation phase and pending trial.
