Retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo continues his battle against the National High Court for the restitution of the materials seized from him when entries and searches were carried out at his home in November 2017. His latest request seeks to recover a battery of tapes that, according to alleges, they have a “high historical value”. The judge has not yet resolved the request, but Anticorruption is clear that the answer must be negative.
Specifically, the commissioner’s defense had registered a letter in which he urged the return of the “microcassettes” that were seized at his home. These are small-sized tapes, like those used in handheld recorders.
This draws attention because the commissioner has been maintaining -the last time on Saturday in an interview on TV3-, that he did not operate a tape recorder and that this is not how he built his famous and compromising record library, but rather that the National Intelligence Center activated in remote your mobile phone
to record with his “consent” and then give him a copy for his own personal “peace of mind.”
The bulk of the materials seized from the commissioner were in digital files, but there were also tapes of various sizes. As sources of the investigation reported to this newspaper, the audio recording and storage formats found in his home were so varied that they perfectly illustrated the evolution of this technology over the last three decades.
For Anticorruption, there is no room for the commissioner’s request whether or not those microtapes that he is claiming from the court have historical value. “The simple reading of many of the covers of these microcassettes shows that their content is directly related to the alleged criminal activity carried out for years by the main investigator José Manuel Villarejo when he was an active police officer in the Deputy Directorate of Operations” , says in a letter to which ABC had access.
He adds that in other cases, those same covers advance that the content of the microtapes “could be directly related to his strictly police functions, in which case the conservation and deposit at his home after his retirement -in the month of June 2016 – lacks all justification’.
“And other actions in the procedure reflect that the content of some of them could contain evidence of the commission of crimes, reasons why the return of these effects is not appropriate, given their nature as pieces of conviction,” the prosecutors also add. .
