A conversation recorded by former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, which has just come to light, could have changed the course of a case for which he was acquitted. The retired policeman was exonerated last January of a crime of revealing secrets for having recorded and broadcast the audio of a meeting held on October 20, 2014 by agents of the National Police and the National Intelligence Center (CNI) in the one who shared information about the arrest three days before of little Nicolás.
The young man had been arrested for posing as an envoy of the government and the Royal House. The recording was made by installing, without his knowledge, an application on the phone of Marcelino Martín Blas, head of the internal affairs unit of the Police and confronted with Villarejo, which served as a background microphone. Martín Blas filed a complaint for these events.
After the trial was held, the Madrid Court ruled that there was insufficient evidence to prove that Villarejo was behind that recording. However, in the Tandem case of the National Court, which is investigating the commissioner's private business, there was an audio of a 2017 conversation in which Villarejo acknowledged having been the "intellectual author" of the recording, with the support of his boss. , the deputy operational director of the Police, Eugenio Pino. In said conversation, to which La Vanguardia and CronicaLibre.com have had access, Villarejo admits to his interlocutor, the lawyer Javier Iglesias, having been "the inducer" and points to Pino as "the material author" of the illegal recording .
Despite the fact that this conversation could have been key to the prosecution of Martín Blas's complaint, and that it had been transcribed and incorporated into the Villarejo macro-case since 2019, it was not until a month ago that the audio reached the National Court from Internal Affairs of the Police. Too late to change a tried and sentenced case.
The Tandem judge, Manuel García Castellón, had promised to send all the evidence that could be relevant to the investigation to the investigating court 2, but this audio did not arrive on time.
The delay in joining the cause of this recording makes others affected by Villarejo's activities fear, among them the victims of the so-called Catalonia operation, that the same thing could have happened with decisive evidence for their cases.
Four days before that clandestinely recorded meeting between the Police and the CNI about little Nicolás, another recording was produced whose authorship never came to light. It was the meeting between the then Minister of the Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz, and the head of the Antifrau Office of Catalonia, Daniel de Alfonso. The recording was explosive, because the minister was heard conspiring with De Alfonso to leak to the press compromising information against CiU and ERC, with the already famous phrase "the Prosecutor's Office will refine it for you." The scandal cost De Alfonso his job.
In his 2014 complaint, Martín Blas provided an email from an Israeli company that manufactures spy software that had been acquired by the National Police, by order of Eugenio Pino.
