Prosecutor wants 13 CDR members to be tried for terrorism
The accusation believes they were planning an attack in 2019, despite police not finding explosives
The Prosecutor's Office of the National Court is seeking to prosecute thirteen members of the Committees for the Defense of the Republic (CDR), nine of whom were arrested in 2019 accused of belonging to a terrorist organisation. Nine are also accused of possessing and manufacturing explosives, El Confidencial reported and ARA has confirmed. The Prosecutor's Office considers there is sufficient proof that the accused were part of a "stable parallel clandestine terrorist organisation, whose objective was to carry out violent actions or attacks against previously selected targets, using explosives and incendiary substances manufactured in the two clandestine laboratories the organisation had installed in two private homes" in response to the sentencing of politicians over the 2017 referendum.
The Prosecutor's Office brief stipulates that their ultimate goal as an organization "was to achieve the independence of Catalonia using violence in its maximum expression and coercively forcing the institutions to grant by deeds the separation of Catalonia from the rest of Spain." The lieutenant prosecutor Miguel Angel Carballo considers that this alleged group would aim to "subvert the constitutional order in a material way, through a planned and organised strategy". The purpose of the defendants, the brief continues, was "to appeal to disobedience directly and the execution of actions of usually tumultuous characteristics that seek to impose a reality of faits accomplis by means of taking of control of the territory and affectating strategic economic sectors and supply chains".
Selecting targets
The prosecution states that the creation of this cell was motivated by "the need to have, within the structure of CDRs, a clandestine group of individuals of the utmost trust who were totally dedicated to "the cause" to be in charge of carrying out the most sensitive actions". The accusation assures that at the time of the arrests, the organization had collected precise information about its possible targets and had developed preparatory acts: "selecting targets, surveillance and controlling police facilities, taking photographs and videos of the predetermined targets".
Among the selected targets were the Naval Command, the Military Government and the Delegation of the Spanish government in Barcelona, as well as the Prosecutor's Office at Catalonia's High Court or the command of the Guardia Civil in Sant Andreu de la Barca. One of those investigated had seven videos and 75 photographs of the building taken from his mobile phone. One of the actions attributed to the defendants is the intention to to occupy the Catalan Parliament, given that plans of the building and material to secure communications and logistical points to resist inside it were located.
The investigated, in addition to having manufactured thermite, according to the investigation, "they carried out experiments for the synthesis of other types of incendiary or explosive substances, as well as testing of launching devices and igniting the thermite" in laboratories set up at their homes. This argument clashes with the position of the National Court, which released the defendants on a symbolic bail three months after entering prison, because it questioned whether they could be accused of being part of a terrorist organisation and that, although some of the detainees had "precursor substances", they were not "themselves explosives". The National Court thus seemed to diverge from the police and the Prosecutor's Office's position.
"It proves the Spanish state does not want to dialogue"
Defence lawyers has denounced the "political intention" of the case, in the context of the forthcoming meeting between the Spanish and Catalan governments. "The Public Prosecutor's Office depends on the Spanish government and they decide to go ahead with this case that would not be tolerated anywhere, showing that the Spanish state does not want to dialogue and that it continues to have independence movement in its sights", they criticised in statements to ARA. They added: "They have not learned that whether they like it or not in the Catalan Countries there will be supporters of independence until we win, despite the fact that they intend to persecute and imprison us".
