The Casuals lost any label linked to the Barça ultras a long time ago to end up becoming a crime branch specializing in extortion, threats, beatings for hire and drug theft from dealers. The Mossos d'Esquadra culminated yesterday a complex judicial investigation with the arrest, for the moment, of 25 people accused of being part of the criminal organization.
The investigation is directed by the head of the trial court number 12 of Barcelona, who accuses those arrested of the crimes of homicide, kidnapping, threats, injuries, extortion, public disorder in the field of sports, cultivation and trafficking of marijuana and integrating a criminal organization.
The investigations started last November after the violent assault on a bar in Cornellà, frequented by the Espanyol radicals. An assault led by one of those arrested yesterday at his home in Santa Coloma de Cervelló, Francisco Pérez, alias Paco el Gordo. Precisely, an audio of this individual went viral a few weeks ago, after the invasion of the field of Espanyol fans after the derby with Barça that gave the League to the blaugrana. The recording required a blue and white fan to remove a tattoo: "If you don't remove it, I'm going to stab you."
The Mossos located Paco el Gordo sleeping at his house, but they did not have such luck with what they consider to be the charismatic and unquestionable leader of the Casuals: Ricardo Mateo López, alias Lucho, who was not at his home in l'Hospitalet, where the The first GEI agents who broke in at dawn only found her 15-year-old son.
After the first minutes of confusion and impotence, investigators from the General Information Police Station and from the kidnapping and extortion unit verified that the suspect had left wearing what he was wearing. Nothing in the house pointed to the possibility that the man had received a tip at the last minute. Rather, it seemed that Ricardo Mateo spent the night away from home, in fact the police found relevant documentation for the case.
The next few hours are crucial for investigators. They have interrogations ahead of them from which they expect little or nothing, because all those arrested are struggling and will not open their mouths. But they will analyze the seized documentation and everything they can obtain from the emptying of the phones of those arrested.
And this is the key to understanding why investigators link some of the Casuals to three murders of drug traffickers in Catalonia.
In March, the Mossos arrested two men accused of murdering and trying to dispose of the body of a man who had been murdered in a Gràcia brothel. They were surprised in a van on Via Augusta. The investigators have no doubts about the authorship of the crime by this drug trafficker, but they will link one of those detained yesterday with the murder as an accessory after the fact or even as someone in charge of ordering the execution.
The other two are crimes committed by drug traffickers for which investigators currently have no perpetrators. In February, a gunman shot dead Mohamed Gdari, brother of well-known rapper Rachid Gdari, alias El Sardina, in the middle of the street in Badia del Vallés, near the Civil Guard barracks. Two months later, in April, a drug dealer was stabbed to death in the Plaza del Nou in Barcelona's Zona Franca
Both crimes are being analyzed by the criminal investigation division, with their respective investigating judges, although the police teams are certain that the Casuals are behind the two murders. These suspicions could be confirmed from the material seized in this latest operation. Hence the relevance of the so-called Hydra case.
