Agents of the Central Operational Unit (UCO) and the Cádiz Command of the Civil Guard have arrested this Friday two other crew members of the drug boat that killed the institute’s agents in the port of Barbate on the night of February 9 armed when ramming the official boat in which he and four other colleagues were traveling, as confirmed by the Ministry of the Interior. The two had remained hidden since the event in Morocco, where they are from. However, the increasing siege of the Civil Guard on them as well as the threats they have supposedly received during these months from the Strait mafias, who have been forced to reduce their activity in the area due to police pressure, has caused that they now return to Spain and can be detained.
On September 19, Karim El Baqqali, 32, who was piloting the boat at the time of the event, was arrested in similar circumstances, as he later confessed. The three, who allegedly worked for the organization of Abdellah EM alias Full, They are accused of two crimes of murder, four of attempted murder, six of attacks, one of smuggling and another of belonging to a criminal organization. With the arrest of both, the so-called Operation Memorial is not yet closed, since a fourth occupant of the drug boat, already identified, remains to be arrested.
The investigation into the tragic event underwent a script twist in May. Until that moment, the investigations had focused on six people who had been arrested a few hours after the event as the alleged perpetrators of the murder of the two agents. However, in which the videos of the event were exhaustively analyzed, they ruled out that they were the perpetrators of the deaths. The police document then confirmed that, although they were also on a drug boat that night in the port of Barbate, it was not their boat that had run over the agents. When they testified before the judge investigating the case, all of them had already declared themselves innocent and one of them assured that he knew the pilot of the drug boat that attacked the zodiac of the armed institute, whom he identified as a certain “Karim.” In addition, he noted that both it and the rest of its occupants “were Moroccans.”
From that moment on, the investigators’ efforts were directed toward identifying the occupants that night of the real drug boat that ran over the agents. A first milestone was the identification of the latter. It was , whose study revealed that the marks on its hull were compatible with having rammed the Civil Guard boat. From that moment, the court opened a separate piece in the summary that it declared secret and to which all the evidence that the investigators were collecting was incorporated. Within this secret room, statements were taken from numerous people – among them the first detainees, already as witnesses for these events – who, according to the consulted sources, provided new evidence that confirmed the identity of the four alleged crew members of the drug boat. It was precisely the progress in these investigations that made it possible to tighten the siege on them.
After being arrested in September, the pilot tried to justify during his statement before the judge his actions that night in an alleged situation of economic and family need, with several children in his care, and that the organization for which he worked transporting consignments between Morocco and The Peninsula had forced him to work piloting drug boats. The confessed author of the deadly attack stressed that at first he thought that he had only slightly hit the victims’ boat and that since he found out through news that he read on the Internet that there were two dead, he had difficulty falling asleep and that, Since then, he wanted to return to Spain. Baqqaly gave the names of the other three people who were with him on the drug boat, although by then they had already been identified by the UCO.
This version that the crew’s intention was not to kill the agents and that everything was an accident, as the pilot claimed after his arrest, contradicts the conclusions of the reports prepared by the Civil Guard after viewing . In this police document, the investigators explained that the high-speed inflatable boat (ENAV, as they are called in the police field) that the four suspects allegedly occupied was the only one that harassed the agents of the six drug boats that had taken refuge. that night in the port of Barbate due to the storm that hit the Cádiz coast. In these videos – one of them recorded with the camera carried by one of the agents – it was seen how the inflatable boat constantly harassed the zodiac of the armed institute for two minutes and 41 seconds, until it fatally ran over it.
During that time, the images showed the harassment, which included five previous attacks and a final sixth that killed the two agents and injured four other colleagues. “They moved away a sufficient distance that allowed them to reach a high speed, returning again in the direction of the official vessel and finally, without deviating the trajectory to avoid the collision, attacking it by entering with their bow from the port side to the starboard side of the affected vessel, passing through on top with the keel, with the entire surface of the hull and with the four engines of 300 horsepower and about 300 kilograms of weight each, equipped with sharp metal elements,” the investigators stated in another police document. The Civil Guard stressed that at that time the drug boat was not carrying drugs or other illegal merchandise that would explain why its crew members had acted in this way to “defend” the cargo. Therefore, they concluded that “the only explanation found to make sense of the brutal ‘gratuitous’ attack […] is the intention to cause them [a los agentes] serious harm or take their lives.”
