The Civil Guard confused artichoke with marijuana and led to the imprisonment of four prison officials

José Luis still remembers the morning he was woken up by the sound of his doorbell. On the other side were several agents of the Civil Guard. He had to go with them to the headquarters to take a statement, they said, for a matter related to his work.

“He has to accompany me with the judge,” he recalls. Neither he nor his wife understood anything. They insisted that they would bring him back right away, and that they were not going to stop him.. Nothing is further from reality.

He is still afraid of reprisals and for this reason he prefers, when speaking with EL ESPAÑOL, that his name not be revealed. However, he is one of the four officials from the Valdemoro prison that the Penitentiary Institutions accused of introducing drugs into the prison.

It was baptized by the Civil Guard as Operation Orion. However, it did not take long to discover that the agents did not find a single piece of evidence of what they were looking for: narcotic substances.

José Luis did not have any lockers in the changing rooms of the prison. For this reason, at first, the civil guards did not find anything but in another module they found a sentry box, supposedly in his name, with a bag containing crushed artichoke leaves.

With that plant, whose already crumbled shape is similar to the dried buds of the cannabis plant, he made infusions to digest during the after-dinner meal.

When writing the proceedings, the agents indicated that they had found “marijuana ready to be sold to the highest bidder.” But there was not and never was any drug ready to be delivered to the inmates.

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On May 31, 2021, the four officials were arrested. Two days later they entered prison. They were not released until October, locked up in a penitentiary module for members of the General State Administration.

In one of the initial reports, the investigators wrote: “So far, after all the operational actions, there is no evidence that directly incriminates the officials”. Despite this, they continued to be held until they were acquitted of all charges.

Now, having been exonerated, history has taken a complete turn: it is another court that is investigating the director of the Valdemoro prison, José Antonio Luis de la Iglesia, and six Civil Guard agents, including the two who prepared the reports. research.

The workers who endured a judicial ordeal for a year and a half now want to locate those responsible for their imprisonment. Already acquitted of the accusation of setting up a plot to introduce drugs into prison, they have sued the head of the prison and the civil guards for the crimes of prevarication, illegal detention and document falsification.

The workers looked for lawyers to take the case. His defense is now exercised by Sánchez Navarro Abogados, the legal representatives of the Tu Abandono Me Puede Matar (TAMPM) union.. The objective is that Interior assumes its responsibility in what happened.

The toxicology report

After his arrest, the contents of the bag with artichoke leaves that the investigators believed to be marijuana were sent to the National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences, a technical body attached to the Ministry of Justice, in charge of conducting expert reports on these matters.

EL ESPAÑOL has managed to access the content of that report, which has remained hidden until today. The document is dated July 30, 2021. The previous legal representatives of the officials did not count on him to defend them, because he was contributed to the case long after the arrest, according to legal sources close to the case.

The judge, upon learning of its existence, requested it on several occasions. The officials assure that they came to request it themselves to the investigating court, by means of a letter, in order to refute the accusations against them and to be able to defend themselves.

The analysis to be carried out consisted of an “investigation of drugs of abuse and most common adulterants”. After various expert techniques, three of the samples yielded the same result on the seized product: “None of the investigated substances is detected.”

In the fourth, vitamin E and niacinamide, a form of vitamin B, were found. No marijuana or other drugs.

The Civil Guard investigations came to nothing, which is why the investigation in the end was only supported by the testimonies of several protected witnesses. And these, despite having made various accusations before the Civil Guard, retracted before the magistrate of the case when she took their statement.

In the videos of their court statements, published by The Objective, they are heard retracting about the officials, whom they accused of drug trafficking. They claimed that they were rumors that they had “heard by hearsay”.

They even accused the investigators of “putting unsaid words into their mouths.”. After this, the magistrate wondered if that was “a hidden camera”. He soon dismissed the matter, releasing the four officials.

The letter to the colonel

This same week, José Luis presented before the judge investigating the case the report from the National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences, together with a letter addressed to the colonel in charge of the Civil Guard Command in Madrid: “Doesn't this call your attention that some agents who are supposed to have made previous seizures, can confuse a substance, and what is more, make appreciations about it?”.

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The serious mistake of the marijuana leaves that were actually artichoke leaves him locked up in a cell for a few months. “All this leads me to two possible conclusions,” he tells the command of the Benemérita. “That the knowledge of these experienced agents is well above that of the Institute of Toxicology, or that they simply lie to you, knowing that you are not going to take the slightest interest in verifying your data, thus involving you as a validator of the false report”.

Along with the letter, the official attached to the colonel a copy of the report that EL ESPAÑOL reveals in this report. The judge will now have to prove if that document was knowingly ignored and why.

The letter ends like this: “Are you going to take any disciplinary action against your men? I am inclined to think that you are not (…). The truth is that I don't care much either, since finally a judge opens investigative proceedings upon finding evidence of a criminal offense. I would like to record my deep respect for you and the institution you represent, despite not having enjoyed such a privilege (…). The overwhelming documentation that we possess does not bode well for the agents involved.. I wish him the best and don't be cheated again.”