Agents from the General Information Commissariat – the intelligence service of the National Police – assure that the investigation into who is behind the shooting of Alejo Vidal-Quadras is the “most complicated” case they have faced in recent years. A recent detainee on the Colombian border, another suspect who supposedly fled to Morocco, the shooter who could be in France or Portugal or the famous Iranian clue that the victim pointed out give a good account of how the tangle of the investigation crosses borders and makes it difficult. progress. At the moment, in the secret case, which continues to be investigated for terrorism, there are more questions than certainties, but the agents are confident in being able to fit the puzzle even if there are many missing pieces to be found.
Colombian authorities arrested Greg Oliver Higuera Marcano, known as Maquia, on Tuesday. He was under a red alert from Interpol for terrorism, which was raised when he tried to cross irregularly into Colombia from Venezuela, where he is from. Despite the media coverage of the arrest, police sources minimize the impact that the arrest may have on progress in the investigation. Maquia's role in the plan to assassinate the former leader of the Popular Party in Catalonia is minor.
The Venezuelan coincided on the Costa del Sol with another of the detainees – now on provisional release – whom he commissioned to purchase the motorcycle with which the hitman fled the central neighborhood of Salamanca after shooting Vidal-Quadras at point-blank range. According to what the unemployed man from Malaga stated in the National Court, Maquia paid him for the acquisition and paperwork of the motorcycle.
As El Confidencial reported, the National Police is looking for another piece of the puzzle that may be more important in dispelling the mystery. This is the Moroccan Sami Bekal Bounouare, alias Pacho. This individual, whose whereabouts are unknown, exchanged several messages after the attack on Vidal-Quadras with the only detainee who was sent to provisional prison, Naraya Gómez, for having a high involvement in the plot. In that exchange of messages he informed himself that the plan had gone well. However, sources close to the investigation assure that, contrary to what has been published, it is not at all clear that Pacho was the mastermind of the attack against which he was one of the founders of Vox.
So far the investigations do not allow Bekal Bounouare to be placed on any specific level of the criminal pyramid. Although the investigators are clear that his role was not residual, as Maquia's could be, they do reject the idea that he culminated as the organizer of the attack. The tangle that the researchers are pulling does not allow, for now, to glimpse how many more knots there are hidden.
Hunting down Pacho is one of the priorities of the Information Commission. Collaboration with the Moroccan gendarmes is essential. This unit of the National Police works very closely on anti-terrorist matters with the Moroccan police, where the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, traveled last Friday. After meeting with his counterpart, he highlighted the close police cooperation between neighboring countries that last year allowed the arrest of more than fifty suspected terrorists.
At this point in the investigation, the hypothesis that Iran may be behind the attack, as the politician pointed out, is not the only one on the table. There are also alleged shady economic affairs in which Vidal-Quadras could be involved, who acknowledged that the Iranian resistance financed the first steps of Santiago Abascal's party with almost a million euros.
Ministerial sources explain that that morning of November 9, in which the pact between PSOE and Junts to invest Pedro Sánchez as president had been announced, the attack could have become “a true destabilizing element”, something that prevented a prompt reaction. politics and police. At a time when several countries appear sprinkled in the instruction, no hypothesis is ruled out.
