Villarejo claims that Spain’s intel was involved in the Barcelona terrorist attack of 2017

Former Spanish police commissioner José Manuel Villarejo said today at the Spanish High Court that the National Intelligence Service (CNI) was involved in the terrorist attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils in August 2017. “I continued to work with the CNI until the last day. I worked with them to try to fix the mess of the famous attack by the Imam of Ripoll, which in the end was a serious mistake by Sanz Roldán, who miscalculated the consequences of making a small scare action in Catalonia”.

Some analysts and media already pointed out that those attacks could have been intended to interfere with Catalonia’s independence referendum, planned for 1 October 2017. Spain has always avoided an investigation on the matter. A year ago, in another court proceeding, Villarejo said that a “very important” source had warned of the “possible risk” of an attack in Barcelona, ​​”as happened unfortunately on the Rambla”. “The CNI said the source was unreliable, because it had previously worked for them, but it was actually a Moroccan spy.” This time, the former police commissioner directly accuses the former CNI director.

Villarejo said this during the trial of three of the branches of the Tandem case that is being held in the Spanish High Court, which is judging several tasks that the former commissioner carried out. Villarejo’s statement supports information about the CNI’s involvement in the attacks, which first appeared in 2019 in the newspaper Público, although it was not investigated during the trial that ended in early 2021. Despite the requests, the Spanish High Court refused to cite Villarejo as a witness in the trial against the three survivors of the organization of the attacks.