MADRID, 15 Mar. (EUROPA PRESS) -
The former head of the Ávila Command, Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Alonso Rodríguez, has asked to appear voluntarily before the judge in the so-called 'barracks case' to demonstrate his "lack of knowledge and participation" in the alleged irregularities committed in the awarding of works that are being investigated in at least 13 Civil Guard headquarters.
Legal sources have confirmed to Europa Press that the defense of Alonso Rodríguez has presented a brief before the Investigating Court Number 3 of Madrid to request that his statement be taken again, as 'Vozpópuli' has advanced, since he came to appear in judicial headquarters when the procedure was investigated in the courts of Ávila, before the case was sent to Madrid.
If the judge agreed to the request, Alonso Rodríguez would testify as an investigated, because he is one of the four defendants in the case. By appearing under this formula, he would have the right not to testify, not to plead guilty and not to answer questions from some of the parties – although at the moment only the Prosecutor's Office and the rest of the defenses appear.
Internal Affairs of the Civil Guard alerted in October 2020 in a report that Alonso Rodríguez in the years 2016 and 2017 entered into his bank accounts different items of cash amounting to 21,500 euros "whose origin (...) has not could be determined."
The objective of said patrimonial report, to which Europa Press has had access, was to determine the real estate and movable capital that the lieutenant colonel who between April 2015 and November 2017 was head of the Ávila Command and who -according to Asuntos Internal-- awarded companies of that contractor "works finally collected but not executed or executed only partially."
Before the report of the Benemérita, the defense of Alonso Rodríguez presented a brief before the court in which he insisted that it was "evident and verifiable" that he had no income that did not correspond to his "declared income level". "There is no significant patrimonial increase," he added while recalling the principle of presumption of innocence.
Among other arguments, the agent explained that he and his wife began to save in cash in June 2010 and that his mother-in-law - who died that year - "did (her) live cash for expenses."
In addition, the lawyer representing the lieutenant colonel stressed that it had nothing to do with the facts being investigated in other command posts outside of Ávila and that the investigation had caused "gratuitous damage" to his "personal image and that of his women". On that occasion, he requested that he be removed from the case as being investigated and that his status be changed to that of a witness.
For now, in this case, Alonso Rodríguez himself, who was head of the Civil Guard Command in Ávila between 2015 and 2017; Lieutenant General Pedro Vázquez Jarava, who was Deputy Director General of Support for the Civil Guard; the self-employed worker Salvador Gutiérrez; and the businessman Ángel Ramón Tejera de León, alias 'Mon', who also appears in the summary of the 'Mediator' case as a person linked to the investigated general Francisco Espinosa, who is in pretrial detention.
The case, which began to be investigated in Ávila in 2019 and was sent to Madrid in 2021, has been paralyzed for at least eight months in the Investigating Court Number 3 of Madrid awaiting an expert report on the works carried out in 13 commands: those of Murcia, Albacete, Algeciras, Alicante, Badajoz, Castellón, Huelva, Jaén, La Coruña, Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Toledo.
Internal Affairs figures the amount of the works awarded between 2008 and 2019 by said commands of the Benemérita to the companies managed by 'Mon' at 3.3 million euros, despite stating that some of them were not executed or were partially carried out, "what could be constitutive of the crimes of falsification in official document, falsification in commercial document and embezzlement".