Former police commissioner Villarejo assures that he was aware of the "risk" of a terrorist attack in Catalonia

MadridDuring the trial for alleged slander and false accusations against the former director of the Spanish National Intelligence Centre (CNI), Felix Sanz Roldan, former police commissioner José Manuel Villarejo said he was aware of the "risk" of a terrorist attack, which "unfortunately happened", referring to August 17, 2017. Villarejo said this in his statement, after contextualizing his poor personal relationship with General Sanz Roldán, whom he accused of having leaked a photograph of him to the press in June 2017 while he was in a secret anti-terrorist operation in Melilla.

Villarejo has said this was due to the personal war between the two. Villarejo went back to 2015 when he explained that there was a "source that warned [them] of the possible attack". He has explained that during a trip he elaborated several informative notes about the risk that some imams in Catalonia were, in fact, agents of the Moroccan secret services. The ex-commissioner explained that the CNI minimized the credibility of this source, and that it frustrated the possibility of infiltrating this source in those circles.

In his statement, Villarejo presented himself as the victim of a campaign by the CNI to discredit him. Without specifying, he has asserted that in one of his missions he stated in internal notes that there were "movements of money in which commissions and reserved funds were mixed, which he understood had to be corrected". Then, he explained that a colonel from the CNI told him: "You touched the money and you fucked it up". "Unfortunately this reached the president of the Spanish government and was the beginning of my downfall", he lamented.