Angela Martialay Madrid

Madrid

Updated Saturday, January 20, 2024-00:05

  • Justice The CGPJ unanimously shows its "resounding rejection" of Ribera's statement: "It contributes to institutional deterioration"

  • Government Teresa Ribera launches a public accusation against Judge García-Castellón for investigating Puigdemont and Moncloa comes out to clarify without citing her

Few, very few magistrates retire at age 72 as investigating judges.

However,

Manuel García-Castellón

will put the final touch on his professional career next October as an instructor.

This man from Valladolid, who has monopolized the covers of all the media for directing some of the causes with the greatest political and social impact in the country in recent decades, has had to apply the law against ETA, jihadism, the sewers of State, international organized crime and political corruption.

His role as a judge has been absolutely vocational and came to him in adolescence when he devoured the books of the Belgian

Georges Simenon

with the character of Commissioner

Jules Maigret

, who captivated him to the point of instilling in him a love for Justice.

Maigret was a police officer who went daily to the Palace of Justice in Paris, climbing the steps of the majestic Conciergerie building to report to a veteran investigating judge about the cases that he was secretly investigating.

Carambolas of life, that young inveterate reader would end up years later being the one who ascended those stairs of the Palace of Justice in Paris every day to go visit the anti-terrorist judge as a liaison magistrate in France.

This magistrate, with exquisite treatment and vast culture - no one in his court has seen "Don Manuel" have "a bad word" - is passionate about reading, motorcycles and hiking.

A veteran of the judiciary who is not afraid of complex cases or facing the most powerful.

In fact, the attacks that he has received throughout his 46 years as a judge - the last one yesterday from Vice President

Teresa Ribera

- have failed to intimidate him.

García-Castellón arrived at the National Court in 1993 with a service commission to occupy the position of former star judge

Baltasar Garzón

, who had then decided to make the leap into politics as a PSOE deputy.

They say that it was the murder of the nine-year-old girl

Olga Sangrador

, where the judge managed to get her murderer,

Valentín Tejero,

to confess to the crime during interrogation, which pushed him to request a place at the National Court.

Sangrador's case has been the toughest he has investigated in more than four decades as a member of the judicial career, according to what he himself has confessed.

His professional life was also marked on July 13, 1997, when he was notified, while he was accompanied by the former Minister of the Interior of the Basque Government,

Juan María Atutxa

, that the PP councilor in Ermua

Miguel Ángel Blanco

had appeared seriously injured .

That fateful afternoon he had to go to the Hospital de Nuestra Señora de Aránzazu in San Sebastián to certify the death of the mayor murdered at the hands of ETA.

The terrible news was preceded by 72 hours of anguish in which the man traveled on an Army plane to the Ertzaintza Command in Deusto to search tirelessly, day and night, dozens of hamlets and hiding places in the country. Basque where the terrorist gang could have kidnapped the young councilor.

Three years after that tragic murder, the instructor left the Court to settle in France.

From Paris he jumped to Rome, where he was appointed as liaison judge in Italy.

In total, he spent 17 years without occupying his office in the court located in Madrid until in June 2017 he announced that he would regain his position as head of the Central Court of Instruction Number 6 of the National Court.

His return to the court astonished his colleagues, who did not understand how Manolo - that's what his friends call him - wanted to dust off case files again.

And he again thoroughly investigated those cases that came to his office table.

If at Christmas 1994 he was the most media judge in Spain for sending the former president of Banesto

Mario Conde

to preventive detention , a myth of that time, in this last period in the Court he was once again the protagonist of the covers for sending a battery of evidence against the former vice president of the Government,

Pablo Iglesias

, to the Supreme Court, or for considering that the former Catalan president

Carles Puigdemont

could have committed terrorism crimes in the years of the

process , in the

Tsunami Democràtic

case

.

In recent years, García-Castellón has investigated the Púnica, Lezo, Kitchen or Dina plot.

The judge has disturbed both the political right and the left of this country and also the Ibex 35. His pulse has not trembled by sending the former Minister of the Interior

Jorge Fernández Díaz

to the dock or in indicting the former president of the BBVA,

Francisco González

.

Nor by keeping one of the most controversial figures in this country, the commissioner linked to the State sewers,

José Manuel Villarejo,

in prison for months .

Even so, there are those who accuse him of being the battering ram of the right.

However, the instructor's records refute this.