The Diplomat in Spain

The Diplomat

The Popular Party announced yesterday that it will ask for the creation in the Congress of Deputies of a commission of enquiry to clarify the circumstances of the stay in Spain of the leader of the Polisario Front, Brahim Ghali.

The announcement was made by the spokesperson of the PP in Congress, Cuca Gamarra, after the judge in charge of the case summoned the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, as a defendant, and asked other high-ranking government officials, such as the former vice-president Carmen Calvo, to testify.

According to Gamarra, the PP wants to know who gave the orders for Ghali to enter and leave the country without the relevant documentation. The spokeswoman pointed to Pedro Sánchez, whose latest statements on the case seem to her to be “a joke”. “He talks about ‘it was done’ and ‘it was decided’, but who decided, who was the ‘x’ in this plot?

In the same vein, the president of the PP, Pablo Casado, said on his Twitter account that, in that commission of enquiry, Sánchez should explain whether he ordered the entry into Spain of the Polisario leader, who was “wanted for genocide, terrorism and rape”.

Casado warned the Prime Minister that “abusing public functions to evade a judicial investigation is a crime of concealment according to article 451 of the Penal Code”.

The spokesman for the Socialist Group in Congress, Héctor Gómez, pointed out that the commission of enquiry promoted by the PP “has no way forward”, Gómez stated that the case was already explained at the time by the then minister Arancha González Laya, and accused the ‘populares’ of “opportunism”.

Meanwhile, yesterday, the head of the Court of Instruction Number 7 of Zaragoza, Rafael Lasala, who is handling the case, ordered the Sirene Spain office and the Subdirectorate General of Information Systems and Communications for Security to inform if any of the member states of the Schengen zone had issued a European arrest warrant or a “mere location warrant to appear before a judicial authority” for Brahim Ghali, on the date he entered Spanish territory.

In an order dated 20 September, the magistrate even asked to be notified if there was any arrest warrant or “any type of alert for entry into any country in the Schengen zone” for “Brahim Ghali Moustafa” or “Gali Sidi-Mohamed Abdelyelil”, names that the National Police have linked to the Polisario leader.

The proceedings are in addition to the reports that have been requested throughout the investigation from the General Information Commissariat of the National Police and the Higher Police Headquarters of Navarre.

For the time being, the judge has called José María Muriel Palomino, former technical secretary general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to testify on 4 October as a witness.

In addition, the judge has rejected the request of the State Attorney’s Office to remove the private prosecution and the complainants from the case. The State Attorney’s Office requested on the 3rd of March that the two complainants and the private prosecution, exercised by the lawyer Antonio Urdiales, be removed from the proceedings or, failing that, that a bail of 150,000 euros be demanded from them in order to participate in the case.