The first Civil Guard report on the bird’s event points to « robbery with force » | Spain

The first report of the Civil Guard on the subtraction of copper wiring that High speed lines between Madrid and Seville collapsed last Sunday It points as the main hypothesis the « robbery with force », according to El País sources known to the content of the police attest. This document has already been delivered in the Court of First Instance and Instruction number 2 of Orgaz (Toledo) that has been made of the investigation and whose holder has opened previous proceedings to investigate the alleged commission of a crime of a crime of robbery strongly In things, according to the Superior Court of Justice of Castilla-La Mancha.

The sources consulted detail that the armed institute report does not rule out other lines of investigation different from common crime, but emphasize that the text does not collect indications that support the version of the supposed sabotage that the Minister of Transportation, Óscar Puente, has defended from the first moment. Puente came to affirm that the action was « quite coordinated » and that who stole the cable in five key points of the line « knew what was going. »

The police document, qualified by these sources as a first preliminary report, is limited to collecting the content of the complaint filed by the Railway Infrastructure Administrator (ADIF), which was the one who warned of the theft of the cable, and the result of the initial investigations of the agents in the five places of the line separated by only 10 kilometers away where cable robberies occurred on Sunday. The attestation does emphasize the especially serious damage that the subtraction caused in an essential service, such as rail transport, and that affected more than 16,000 people between Sunday and Monday, with delays in the trains that reached nine hours.

The minister argued his suspicions in the low value of the stolen (about 300 euros, according to the estimates of his department); The chosen date, the May 1 bridge, and that the 10 kilometers stretch where the robberies occurred had no surveillance. Along the same lines, the Executive spokeswoman, Pilar Alegría, was expressed at the press conference after Tuesday. This kept this theory alive by stating that « those who executed this damage knew the damage very well, were not usual dates. It was the final bridge, the April Fair began … there was a clear will to harm. »

However, in private, other sources of the Executive have already softened the hypothesis of sabotage and were open to the possibility that it would have been a simple robbery. This Thursday, Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska, has also been cautious before knowing the content of the First Civil Guard report. Grande-Marlaska has assured that « all hypotheses are open » and has asserted that « one or the other cannot be excluded », so he has urged « waiting » for the results of the investigation.

The theft of copper in the railway lines is not, much less, an isolated episode. The statistics of the Ministry of Interior collect that, only in 2024, the National Police and the Civil Guard investigated 4,433 cases of subtraction of this metal and other conductive materials both in rail infrastructure and warehouses and other places. That is, an average of 12 a day. This statistic does not collect the events of these characteristics registered in the Basque Country and Catalonia, where Ertzaintza and Mossos d’Esquadra have transferred police powers. In fact, Catalonia leads from far the copper theft statistics, since in 2023 he accumulated more complaints (5,372) than in the rest of Spain as a whole (more than 4,000).