Two days after the 28-M elections, a case that has nothing to do with the purchase of votes that is being known these last days explodes across the entire forehead of the Andalusian PSOE, but rather with the possible involvement of one of the hands rights of the general secretary of the PSOE-A, Juan Espadas, in a kidnapping of a councilor from his own party.
The matter was under summary secrecy until this Thursday when some of the details of the case were released. The victim, Vanessa Romero, a councilor for the Maracena (Granada) City Council, directly points to the current organization secretary and former mayor of her town, Noel López, and his successor and cousin, Berta Linares, as the instigators of her kidnapping.
The alleged perpetrator of the kidnapping, Linares' ex-partner, has acknowledged that he acted with a pre-established plan organized by López and Linares.
Both have come to the fore to deny the greater and place all the responsibility on the executor of the kidnapping, Pedro Gómez, sentimental partner of the mayoress at the time of the events last February.
After learning the details of the judge's order investigating the matter, Linares went public yesterday to argue that everything is based "on the accusation of a person who she herself admits has bipolar disorder," and that "they should not be given credit." . It is "a strategy that he and his lawyer are obviously trying to try to get out of prison," she said.
Linares and López have made a common front with the same argument. The suspicions that weigh on them are, in his opinion, an invention created by Gómez, a person whom they define as "unbalanced".
Gómez himself acknowledged to the Civil Guard after his arrest that he has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, that his partner, the mayoress, was aware of it and that he was undergoing treatment.
In fact, when a month earlier, during a meal in a tavern, they planned the kidnapping, initially they thought of hiring two people – “two Ukrainians” –, according to what Gómez explained during his interrogation. Always according to the testimony of the person under investigation, Noel López was the one who came up with the idea that Gómez himself would give him a scare and take away his mobile phone to destroy it. According to the testimony, López insisted on this plan because, due to his illness, nothing was going to happen to Gómez and in the event that Vanessa Romero denounced him, "they would put a lawyer on him and he would simply be scared."
For now, a formal accusation does not weigh on them until the Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia (TSJA) makes a decision once the investigating judge number 5 of Granada has sent the matter to that court as López is appraised.
Both López and Linares have encapsulated the evidence against them in the judicial statement of Gómez, in unconditional prison after his arrest. However, both the judge and the prosecutor believe that there is a battery of evidence against them.
The matter goes back to the month of February when Vanessa Romero was kidnapped by Pedro Gómez at the door of her children's school. Once in her car, she tied his hands and feet with zip ties, then gagged her, took her to a garage and locked her in the trunk. According to the version of both the victim and the alleged perpetrator of the illegal detention, the origin of that kidnapping was the bad relationship that Romero had with Linares. With her kidnapping plan, they tried to take her phone and the documents she kept on irregular files that affected the stage of both López and Linares as mayors of Maracena.
One of the pieces of evidence handled by the investigators is that on the day of the kidnapping, as soon as they discovered that Romero had escaped from the car, taking advantage of the fact that his kidnapper had left, there was a crossover of calls between those possibly involved and they even came to see the same person. late.
For the judge and the prosecutor, the account of both the complainant and the person being investigated enjoy "very solid indicative support, not only because of the security and number of details offered by both, which are essentially the same, but also because the account is based on a large number of objective elements that endorse the veracity of it." "These tests would be the verification of the recordings of the security cameras, the recovery of the effects that the investigated carried in the backpack (knife, flanges, pistol, gloves, etc.), the verification of the acquisition of the pistol and the machete through the Amazon platform, the testimonies of the municipal architect and the person in charge of the hardware store who attended him, the screenshots of the WhatsApp messages, the eye report of the garage, examination of the investigated mobile phones and the vehicle, etc. ”, according to the court decision.
