The judge awaits a forensic report to decide whether to interrogate in prison the false priest who assaulted the house of Bárcenas

On January 29, in the infirmary of the Aranjuez prison (Madrid), a judicial commission headed by the instructor of the Villarejo case, Manuel García-Castellón, visited Enrique Olivares, the man who, disguised as a priest and armed with a revolver, He assaulted the Bárcenas house in the fall of 2013. Investigators suspect that Olivares may have acted as a hired hitman for the Interior Ministry, as part of the espionage operation against the ex-treasurer of the Popular Party, then the main threat of political formation in government.

The purpose of the visit was to learn first-hand about the state of health of Olivares, who suffered a stroke in 2018 while serving his 22-year sentence in the Cuenca prison. Precisely, this vascular accident caused the Penitentiary Institutions to transfer Enrique Olivares to Aranjuez, a prison with better accessibility, while the prison technicians weighed whether his deteriorated state of health recommended transferring him definitively to a healthcare center, according to reported eldiario.es in December 2018.

Olivares unexpectedly improved and over the months. Having completely lost the ability to express himself, he began to do so with limitations and sometimes with the help of another inmate. This change in his condition has motivated the visit of the judicial commission, which also included the two Anticorruption prosecutors in the case, the court clerk and a forensic doctor.

The persistence of doubts about the true state of Olivares, 71, and his ability to give testimony motivated García-Castellón to request a report from the coroner after the visit, the preparation of which has been delayed due to the loss of the official. and the subsequent situation in the National Court derived from the health crisis by Covid-19.

The investigations into the role of the false priest are part of piece 7 of the Villarejo case, which investigates the alleged espionage of the ex-treasurer of the PP with the intention of sabotaging the investigation of the National Court by the B box of the Popular Party. And they join another important novelty in the case, the seizure of the mobile of which was number two of the Ministry of the Interior at the time of Operation Kitchen, Francisco Martínez, the day before the state of alarm was decreed. Martínez is accused along with all the controls of the front line of the political brigade in times of the PP.

The false cure, Enrique Olivares is serving a 22-year prison sentence for the kidnapping of Rosalía Iglesias, Guillermo Bárcenas and the housekeeper Victoria Feliz de la Cruz, among other crimes committed on October 23, 2013 at the ex-treasurer's home in the Madrid neighborhood of Salamanca. According to information from Okdiario, Olivares was captured by the police officers who directed the espionage at the Bárcenas, and collected 10,000 euros from the reserved funds for the assault on the house in search of documentation on the PP.

The researchers try to clarify Olivares' possible link with Operation Kitchen. One of the protagonists of the para-police operation was Sergio Ríos Esgueva, a chauffeur for the Bárcenas family who lent himself to reporting on the movements of Rosalía Iglesias, once her husband entered prison, and stealing documents in exchange for 2,000 euros per month of the reserved funds .

Ríos ended up charging 48,000 euros from the Police and he received a weapon, as recorded in documentation seized from Villarejo's home and from information declassified by the Government. On the day of the priest's assault, he told the Bárcenas family that he was going out for a while to visit his then wife, who was dependent on a nearby clothing store. He was the first to access the home after Willy Bárcenas untied himself from the bridles, butted the false priest, who was armed with a revolver, and reduced it. When he stopped working for the family he entered the Police, at the age of 42, and was assigned to a position that is considered an award.

Who paid for Olivares' lawyer?

At the trial, the defendant screamed that voices inside his head were giving him orders. The court concluded that he was pretending, although the judgment of the Madrid Provincial Court recognized in Olivares a "personality disorder with paranoid, narcissistic and antisocial features". This diagnosis was a mitigating factor and he was sentenced to the penalty provided by law in his lower half, that is, six years for each of the kidnappings, plus two years for illicit possession of weapons, six months for trespassing and others three crimes of threats, also punished with six months each.

Enrique Olivares was assisted by a public defender lawyer in Madrid during the entire investigation, but before the trial his defense was taken over by Andrés Ruiz Cubero, a criminal lawyer with an office in the capital and also in Cuenca, where the false priest hails from, who had been presented almost as a homeless man. Ruiz Cubero has declared to eldiario.es that he took over the defense of Olivares because he was asked to do so by a client and friend of the Cuenca office that has nothing to do with the police or political world.

The confirmation that the false priest had acted under the orders of the PP's political police would constitute the most serious event in an operation designed to benefit the PP's leaders. The police officers have acknowledged that they raided a place where Rosalía Iglesias kept pictures with the keys that the driver gave them and that they monitored all their movements with a device installed in their mobile phone clandestinely.

They have also confessed that Martínez, the Secretary of State for Security, had a laptop to follow all the news of Operation Kitchen. The terminal is sealed at the headquarters of the General Information Police Station. Those same policemen and the then number two of Interior defend that the operation was destined to find the figureheads and the money hidden by Bárcenas. However, neither the judge of box B, Pablo Ruz, nor the UDEF police officers acting on his orders ever knew anything about him.

Operation Kitchen was the work of the same group of policemen who participated in the prospective investigations and without judicial control against the leaders of the sovereignist process in Catalonia and who later they would use similar methods to falsely accuse Podemos of irregular financing, coinciding with the first time that Pablo Iglesias' party chose to govern with the PSOE, in 2016.