The former commissioner affirms that the CNI even proposed sending tanks to Catalonia in 2012, although he himself proposed replacing them with National Police vans.
Former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo stated this Monday that the then Minister of the Interior, Juan Ignacio Zoido was the one who ordered the police charges in Catalonia during the day of the unilateral 1-O referendum.
Villarejo starred this Monday in a face to face with the former president of the Generalitat Artur Mas on the RAC1 station, coinciding with the sixth anniversary of the unilateral 1-O referendum.
In the context of the so-called Operation Catalonia, Villarejo has assured that the National Intelligence Center (CNI) even proposed sending tanks to Catalonia in 2012although he himself proposed replacing them with National Police vans in the framework of “judicial operations” against alleged corruption plots.
In the face to face, Villarejo has pointed out that the CNI knew the whereabouts of the 1-O ballot boxes, but that they did not act because they were looking for “a small controlled explosion” in order to demonstrate that the referendum “was a pantomime and a daydream.”
The former commissioner has indicated that in 2017 The Ministry of Defense “did not have the capacity” to manage the CNI, since the then Vice President of the Government, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, convinced President Mariano Rajoy so that she would be the one to control the center.
Furthermore, Villarejo has stated that Rajoy himself I congratulate” after Convergència i Unió lost its absolute majority in the 2012 Parliamentary elections, when operations to discredit Catalan nationalism were already “underway” following “worrying information.”
And he has admitted that part of Operation Catalonia sought to discredit CiU, the only actor with the “capacity” and structure to give a “headache” to the State.