Salomé Pradas before the dana commission in Congress: “I apologize for not having been able to do more and it is something that I will carry throughout my life” | Spain

The then counselor of Justice and Interior of the Generalitat, Salomé Pradas, accused in the case opened on the flood in the Catarroja court, has begun her appearance in the dana commission in Congress with a warning: she was not going to respond to anything due to her status as an investigator. And during the first minutes he attended impassively a stream of uncomfortable questions from the deputies who accused him of responding to a television program and not before Parliament. But he ended up breaking his promise of silence soon. At one point, Pradas, through tears, pointed out: “I am not going to allow you to tell me here that I lack heart.” Cayetano García Ramírez, who served as regional secretary of the Presidency with the former president Carlos Mazón.

Pradas decided to activate the microphone not to answer the most basic questions about the key hours of the emergency, nor if she knew where the president was, nor if she felt alone, nor why the alert arrived so late, she did it to get into a discussion about the formation of Cecopi and its advisory bodies, when the Bildu deputy, Mikel Otero, pointed to her responsibility as the ultimate director of that emergency commission. Pradas has wanted to clarify the technical makeup of that body, which received that day the Aemet notices and the 112 calls, and has criticized that the figure of the “single command” contradicts national law. Otero then proceeded to read the national and regional plans that determine how the sole command corresponds to the Emergency Minister, to her in this case, while Pradas shook his head.

Otero has also pointed to another key moment: “At 5:47 p.m. you already proposed sending a message for people to go up to the high areas. But there it is cut off and they are going to do it, I don’t know what. But it leaves out the others. You say that the alert is raised at 7 p.m., but it is not true, it is before. And that is what you have to clarify,” he points out. Pradas has not responded to that.

“For me the victims are the fundamental ones, it doesn’t matter how I am,” he responded to the Esquerra deputy, Gabriel Rufián when he asked him how he was. “I am not going to allow them to say here that I lack heart,” Pradas responded on the verge of tears. And in front of a piece of rope that Rufián has left on his table, to which a girl clung so that it would not be carried away by the current, which finally dragged her and ended her life, she declared while crying: “I apologize for not having been able to do more and it is something that I will carry with me all my life.”

“I was at the bottom of the canyon,” Pradas repeated to the Sumar deputy, Alberto Ibáñez, who blamed him for delaying the Cecopi call that day for two hours (at 5 p.m.) to go “to be seen with the forest firefighters” in Carlet. Pradas has rejected that accusation and insisted that he was there to ask them for information about the storm.

On December 1, after the broadcast on La Sexta of , the commission decided to summon her to appear. Until that moment, the commissioners had chosen to delay the summons for which he was responsible for Emergencies, despite the fact that his name appeared just after Mazón’s on the list of appearances approved by this body.

Days after the interview, Pradas handed over to Catarroja judge Nuria Ruiz Tobarra, who is investigating the case, and to his former chief of staff, José Manuel Cuenca, on the day of the flood. From 11:32, Pradas punctually informed the president of the magnitude of the flood and the risk in the infrastructure that unleashed the catastrophe, the Poyo ravine: “I am in communication with Pilar Bernabé [delegada del Gobierno en Valencia]. What is of most concern now is the area of ​​Ribera Alta, Poyo ravine and Magro river. We have just decreed a hydrological alert in municipalities in that area. We have reinforced 112, we have displaced forest firefighters, the consortium [provincial de bomberos] also at full capacity. We are also going to ask for caution due to maritime storms,” he told Mazón via WhatsApp, who at that time kept his institutional agenda intact.

In those messages provided by Pradas to the judge it is seen how Mazón’s chief of staff and right-hand man, José Manuel Cuenca, The former counselor reported to Cuenca at 4:28 p.m., half an hour before the start of the meeting of the Integrated Operational Coordination Center (Cecopi), that she had been informed of “a deceased in Utiel.” Hours later, during the worst of the flood, Cuenca asked Pradas not to decree the confinement of the population: “Salo, if you confine anything, please calm down,” he wrote.

At 3:30 p.m., Cayetano García Ramírez, then regional secretary of the Presidency and current regional secretary of Economy in the Executive of Juanfran Pérez Llorca, is scheduled to appear before the commission. According to what he stated in his first statement before the judge, . The former regional secretary of the Presidency was the senior official who spoke the most with Pradas that afternoon, he did so for five minutes and 33 seconds.