I admit that I had to read the news story several times before I could believe it: the Civil Guard included in the summary of its so-called Volhov operation the first page of a book entitled El secret de la clandestina ("The undercover agent's secret"), originally written in Russian and later translated by Josep Lluís Alay to Spanish and Catalan, alleging that it was a Russian report that proved his connection with that country's secret service. Only the clumsiness of the police operation and the fact that the "document" found on Alay's mobile phone was a word-perfect transcription of the first page of the book allowed the pro-independence politician to expose this atrocious incident.
The information, conveniently leaked to a Madrid print newspaper, linked a Pravda journalist, grandson of a former foreign minister and former head of the country's foreign intelligence service, the SVR, to an interview with exiled Catalan president Carles Puigdemont - Alay is the head of the president's office in Brussels. Well, Alay, who, as a university professor and historian is also a translator of Russian books, had, saved on his phone, the first pages of the book he had translated and which explained what the SVR was, not as supplied by some Russian confidant but directly from the pen of its author, Elena Vavilova.
Such has been the laughter generated by the action of the Civil Guard that the publishing house itself, Símbol Editors, has also apologized to Alay, not without a certain irony: "Mr Alay, we are sorry for the inconvenience that the translation of El secret de la clandestina has caused you. Sincerely, we would never have imagined that it would be used to arrest and incriminate you." Something that is, at the moment, so inexplicable that even 24 hours after the story broke no one has been able to give any explanation. Although the truth is that Alay was arrested in October 2020, his phone was confiscated and information stored on the device has been gradually made public without any apparent checks and balances.
The Volhov case is the most recent of the major judicial operations launched to criminalize the Catalan independence movement. Barcelona's court number 1, presided over by judge Joaquín Aguirre, ordered a number of arrests, some being people with high profiles in the media and politics, and the case is still proceeding under judicial confidentiality. Already, when the story broke, it was said that much of the alleged evidence was mere conjecture. The botch-up over Alay only confirms that there is too much cut-and-paste, once again, when it comes to incriminating people in some Catalan pro-independence cases.
In this case, the falsity of the evidence has ended up being so obvious that it will have no consequences for Josep Lluís Alay. But one can only wonder and be alarmed about how it turns out when the error committed is not so obvious and the case continues due to its own apparent importance. In those instances, what happens to the presumption of innocence and the final outcome?