The accusations of former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo before Spain’s National Audience court, blaming the Spanish National Intelligence Centre (CNI) and its director in 2017, Félix Sanz Roldán, who had previously served as Chief of Defence Staff, for the 2017 jihadist terror attacks in La Rambla and Cambrils in which 16 people died and another 140 were injured, are of enormous gravity. His denunciation had a great impact, partly because the Spanish state has always wanted to draw a veil over the matter and avoid revealing the full truth. It left enough loose ends to cast doubt on the official version: prohibition of commissions of inquiry in Congress, prohibition of Villarejo to testify in the trial that took place, panic about a credible explanation about the real role of imam Abdelbaki es Satty, officially killed in the explosion of the villa of Alcanar on the eve of the attacks. And, thus, numerous threads to pull.
So when Villarejo made his statement in Spain’s National Audience court, Pandora's box was opened, we will see if definitively. "I have continued working with the CNI [has declared the former commissioner] until the last day. I was talking with them in order to fix the mess of the famous attack of the imam of Ripoll, etcetera, etcetera, which, in the end, was a serious mistake by Mr. Sanz Roldán, who miscalculated the consequences for giving Catalonia a little scare". A person as prudent as the former Catalan minister of Interior Quim Forn, who held the position at the time, took only a few minutes to say aloud what is already a widespread clamour, as well as a democratic demand: "We have the right to know the truth. And to ask the Public Prosecutor's Office for explanations. What does the Public Prosecutor's Office intend to do? Turn a blind eye, as the Congress of Deputies has done?"
Evidently, what happened on August 17th, 2017 was no small scare. It was a massacre of colossal proportions that left many questions, too many suspicions and great concern. Why was the Spanish State so interested in shelving a subject that required light and stenographers? Do the words of former minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel García-Margallo, advancing a few weeks earlier that as from the second half of August [2017] things would happen, have anything to do with the aforementioned events? Other statements, such as: "A terrorist attack can be overcome, the dissolution of Spain is irreversible", now take on a new and worrying meaning.
It is striking —and, unfortunately, expected— how many media are, in these first hours, tiptoeing around a subject that, it hurts to say it like this, with this crudeness, would imply a state crime. The null reporting on television, the lack of coverage in the digital editions of the newspapers of Madrid and Barcelona, the silence of the parties of the regime of 1978, which in this matter form a united front, from Vox to the PSOE. We will see what the front pages say about this matter; and we will also see if the artillery of the Catalan pro-independence parties begins and ends with Twitter posts and requests for parliamentary hearings, or if there is something with more substance and proportional to the seriousness of the accusations.
Villarejo can be believed or not. But what is categorically not valid is to believe him when there is benefit to be obtained, as many have done so far —the newspaper archives with statements of many Spanish rulers and politicians prove this—, and now, because it is uncomfortable, gaslight him. Because the terrible image of the GAL (death squads which officials of the Spanish government illegally established to fight against ETA) returns to a tragic, corrupt, lost and black and white Spain.