Pompeyo González has returned to his home in Miranda de Ebro (Burgos) after almost three months in preventive detention. His name may sound completely unknown, even to his own neighbors. He is the unabomber who wanted to sow panic – scare or create confusion – within the Government by sending a chain of threatening letters with explosive material. All the objectives that this retiree pointed out in his letters had a common link: the support that his recipients showed Ukraine in the face of the Russian invasion.
The judge of the National Court José Luis Calama has released him, after he was sent to provisional prison on January 27 after being caught by the National Police. His advanced age –74 years old–, that he had never crossed the criminal line before and his way of life have tipped the balance for the investigating judge to review his situation and allow him to return home.
The investigators still have not revealed why he did it, what was the motivation that led him to prepare those letters with pyrotechnic material and a small explosive device for the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez; the Defense Minister, Margarita Robles; to the United States embassy in Spain –with which he caused an injury–; an arms company from Zaragoza; and the European Union Satellite Center, located at the Torrejón de Ardoz military base (Madrid). This last letter, the only one that was not detonated, was key to the investigation.
The judge maintains that the detainee's idea – after a laborious investigation by the General Information Commissioner of the National Police – was to force the central government to stop the humanitarian and military aid that Spain has been providing to the Kyiv government since the beginning of the war. . But Pompeyo González, according to legal sources, has not opened his mouth since he was arrested: he has not given any explanation. Thus, at the moment it is unknown what went through his head.
No one knows what prompted him to get up one day, start buying the materials and prepare a plan to send all those letters with explosive material, which can lead to many years in jail after retirement and without any prior criminal record. His ideas in favor of the Vladimir Putin regime, based on an outdated idea of communism, will lead him to face six crimes of terrorism and another for the use of flammable or incendiary explosive devices for terrorist purposes. No one knows if he regrets what he did, if he was fully aware of it or if he is sorry. What does seem clear is that his actions can lead him to be locked up until the end of his days.
The researchers have been able to determine in what environment it moved. A solitary man, he rarely associated with his neighbors in Miranda de Ebro; "an unsociable being", as sources of the investigation explain to La Vanguardia. How did the unabomber live – in reference to Theodore John Kaczynski, an American mathematician who for almost two decades was sending bomb letters – Spanish? "Pompey is a spartan and routine person," explain the researchers who followed the trail of letters, stamps and materials until they found him. He spent the afternoons working in his workshop that he had set up at home and where he prepared the threatening letters.
After retiring his life was the workshop and the pages where the progress of the Russian invasion was reported. Of course, according to the investigations, he was not a consumer of traditional media, but of pro-Russian pages oriented more to disinformation and fake news, with a favorable view of Russian actions in Ukraine.
From the seized material, they have been able to determine that González defined himself as a "leftist patriot" although without a clear political affiliation. With a past as a follower of communist ideas, he developed a "deep" pro-Russian and anti-NATO sentiment, which led him to the conviction that the invasion of Russia was justified by the abuses of the Atlantic Alliance and its breaches of the supposed commitment to Russia not to expand to the east.
His hobbies included consuming pro-Russian propaganda and shopping on the Internet to obtain material. In the first months of the summer of 2022, the detainee bought through Amazon a kilo of pure potassium nitrate, cable with a wick, switches, copper filaments and incandescent light bulbs. In October and November he made the purchase of adhesive stickers, hinges, all kinds of screws, precision drill bits and templates to draw numbers and the alphabet –with which to write addresses–. The agents of the Information Police Station who carried out the searches even found a tampered drone, capable of transporting and unloading explosive material similar to that introduced in the envelopes. He was arrested on January 25, just over two months after the first of the letters to Moncloa arrived.
Despite the secrecy shown to the agents since then, the hypothesis that is gaining strength among the researchers is that the retiree wanted to send a message. And it is that although the devices that he carefully prepared "have enough power to cause serious injuries" -and in certain circumstances even more than that- "it is difficult to think of an intention to attack", given the security controls to which they are subjected. of threatening letters: physical security, security guards with scanners, packet reception protocols. However, the same sources continue, "they were explosives that traveled through mail traffic and passed through many hands: the subject has taken serious risks"
