A meeting On this Friday afternoon at the headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior, all the representatives of parliamentary groups summoned and the data from the Terrorist Threat Assessment Table on the agenda. It is the format that the Government chose this Thursday to try stop the speculation game about the risk of a jihadist attack in Spain.
The minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska reacted by calling this Friday’s meeting after a morning and mid-afternoon of constant growth of a barrage of hoaxes, seasoned with insinuations from right-wing politicians that increased the level of alarm – this real one – that was spreading through all types of social networks .
The head of the Interior intends to explain what technical reasons and what information from the intelligence services that participate in this evaluation table have led to maintaining the alert level (NAA, in its technical acronym) at the fourth step, but reinforcing surveillance, and what reasons would lead to raising it to level 5 if that became necessary.
The Interior has also announced that the minister intends to explain to the parties what was said this Thursday in Luxembourg with the rest of the EU partners on immigration and security risks, under the influence of the war tension between Israel and the Palestinian militia Hamas.
Politicians ask…
An NAA 5, “very high risk” implies, in addition to the measures contemplated at all other levels, others classified as Secret. Among them is the collaboration of military forces in public security, if necessary, and important restrictions on citizen mobility among details that the Interior does not publish for reasons, precisely, of security.
That level 5, planned for risks of large-scale terrorist attacks, It has never been activated in Spain since the NAA exists, which came into force in March 2005 with the Anti-Terrorism Prevention and Protection Plan, and changed with its subsequent reform of the plan, in 2015.
Despite this lack of precedent, the mayor of Madrid, The popular José Luis Martínez-Almeida, asked this Thursday that the Interior raise the alert level, and more so in view of the Christmas holidays, with the crowds that occur in the city center. “It is reasonable,” said the mayor to support his request, and alluded to the fact that other European capitals have done so. No Western country, except France, is at the maximum level of anti-terrorist alert, as this newspaper has explained.
For his part, the leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, contributed to the alarm speech bringing the ember to his usual story about danger that his party sees in immigration: “In El Hierro we are witnessing a true migratory invasion, with men of military age. There are thousands who have arrived in the Canary Islands this year,” he declared at the Tenerife North airport, to then juxtapose with jihadist terrorism: “The Islamic terrorist from Brussels had entered as an illegal immigrant very recently. There are 300 lone wolves in Spain ready to attack. “They are being watched, but everything fails sometimes.”
…and activists agitate
The conjectures of political leaders They joined a great hoax spiral destabilizing forces that even the State Security Forces have had to confront. Since early Thursday morning, a main hoax has been circulating on Whatsapp according to which “they have just put the National Police Corps on alert 5, imminent attack…”.
More or less similar stories were added to well-known social networks. far-right propagandists. In the dance of this narrative he even participated the leader of Desokupa, Daniel Estevebroadcasting a video in which he says that his “police and military friends” assure him that “the real alert level is 5”, and ends by saying: “They don’t give a shit about your safety.”
The National Police published a tweet on X that has obtained half a million visits, asking the citizen: “Have you received this message ooooo again? Do you still believe this hoax from 2017?”
The Civil Guard, from various commands, called on the public not to trust unofficial messages “that do nothing but distort reality and create tension in the population,” specifically said one from the Algeciras Command, a particularly delicate point due to coexistence. with an important Muslim colony, and due to sad events of supposed jihadist origin.
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“Any unfounded alarm implies playing into the hands of the terrorists, who precisely what they want is for us to live in fear,” a police official who advises Moncloa explains to this newspaper. Both State Security bodies have done a call for responsibility of citizens, asking them through social networks not to broadcast those messages.
From Luxembourg, at the end of the meeting of Interior Ministers that he had to lead for the turn of European presidency that is falling on Spain, Minister Marlaska announced: “We will be attentive to act against radicalization and against those who, protected in the current context of destabilization, They unscrupulously feed misinformation and hate speechsuch as anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and racism.