The twin police officers were investigating in Ourense after the death of a colleague, as can be seen in a file photo. Brais Lorenzo
“Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m like this… I give everything for my brother: I die and kill for him, and that’s not a phrase from Belén Esteban.” On October 9, 2015, six months before the national police officer Celso Blanco was found shot dead in his office — allegedly a suicide driven by the burden of guilt — Agent Roi DL spoke to a colleague in this way.
The brother that Roi loves so much is called Bernardo. They are identical twins; so close since pregnancy, so equal, that they have the same hobbies, the same job, the same way of speaking, the same friendships and even the same clothes. Presumably, according to the judge from Ourense, who has been eyeing them for seven years, the twins probably share the same secret. In her final decision, which can be challenged in court, the instructor attributes Celso’s death to the brothers and agrees to turn the investigation into a people’s jury trial. “There is no case in Galicia more worthy of a detective story,” warns a veteran officer who worked on the investigation.
When the fast-paced thriller broke within the National Police, the twins were on duty at Ourense Police Station and a leadership change at headquarters had separated them from their positions and their ambitions in favor of other colleagues. At the end of 2015, the so-called Operation Zamburiña broke out in Ourense after a series of anonymous messages from the police themselves, between November 2014 and the following February, reached the media, the court and the Interior Department. The emails revealed both the theft of guns stored in the police station bunker and the existence of a “group of totally corrupt police officers” in the drug squad linked to drug dealers who supplied them with drugs to be freely sold for tips .
When, in the afternoon of Saturday April 9, 2016, the body of Celso Blanco was discovered lying face down on the ground in a pool of blood, with a gunshot to the left side of the head and spatter all over the base of the At the table in In his fifth-floor office, the autopsy concluded that suicide was the “most likely” hypothesis. In his left hand, the left-handed martial arts and shooting instructor held a Heckler & Koch USP Compact pistol. It was one of the stolen guns. Two more of the six disappeared turned up in the government register, strangely enough none of them had their fingerprints.
In another lecture, recorded on April 19, 2016, which contains a 56-volume synopsis attempting to explain how Celso lost his life, the other twin, Bernardo, informed his partner that the next day he was in the investigation will testify. on the death of his friend and partner in the press area: “I have to be in court at four. The judge called Roi to take a statement from us…the judge handling the matter of murder…deeeel…suicide”. In her 158-page order detailing the incident, the same judge, Eva Armesto, emphasizes that “if Celso had been the victim of murder, only the person who committed the murder could know at the time.” The leader of the Court of Inquiry 3 strings together 26 “clear clues” collected in painstaking scientific reports ranging from the composition of gunpowder to the changing direction of blood jets in the head, to studying the body language of the suspect or the thousandth of a second it takes a bullet takes to penetrate a skull. She is convinced that these two waterdrops named Bernardo and Roi, who could not be distinguished by their DNA, planned and carried out the crime together. Also sending anonymous letters and, with or without Celso, stealing weapons.
The deceased was their ostensible ally in intrigue and as regular at the range as themselves, at a time when professional jealousy of the new commanders who had removed them from the positions they had so longed for was presumably the war at the police station. . Contrary to the criteria still used by the prosecutor who requested the file, and various reports that pointed from the outset to the suicide of a repentant Celso, Armesto does not doubt that the agent was murdered by these brothers, to blame the dead. . In their opinion, they feared that she would eventually betray them, and by dying they would put an end to the growing mess they had started to tarnish their rivals’ reputations. If the case goes to trial, the prosecution will include the dead agent’s brother, the prosecution, the Unified Police Union and two agents badly harmed by the anonymous man: the former drug lord who was eventually arrested and prosecuted – but acquitted , because the wiretaps were canceled in the process — at Operation Zamburiña, investigating deals between police officers and informants, and at the gunsmith in charge of the bunker when the guns disappeared.
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The forensic diagnosis, which raised the possibility that Celso had taken his own life, was supported by multiple reports that the 48-year-old victim was a friendly-mannered police officer known in Ourense as a press officer. In a multi-recipient email sent the afternoon he died at his work computer, he confessed to the theft of the guns and the anonymous letters that had upset the guts of the police station: “I’m very sorry , what’s happened. I’m sorry I took the guns from the bunker and the anonymous letters I sent. You have caused great harm to many people, especially a great friend and former boss. I’m sorry. Celsus”. And in a wasp he sent from his cell phone to friends at a gastronomy club, the deceased probably also wrote: “One day you’ll understand.”
National Police Station in the city of Ourense. OSCAR CORRAL
The judge assumes that Bernardo was the actual author of the shot. That he entered the hidden building in the trunk of the Volvo his brother drove, and that from the garage, to avoid being caught by the cameras, he entered through a three-foot-tall door that few agents knew about and which was closed one led tap air. From this corridor he managed to catch the elevator to go to the fifth floor. At 15:51 the cabin blew up. None of the five officers seated at the table that Saturday used the elevator, but a camera allows us to see it moving. Next, the man who was due to die that afternoon arrived on his motorcycle. A camera films him calling the elevator around 3:55 p.m. with martial arts pants in hand. It is his last living picture. Celso had to wait about 29 seconds for the elevator to go into the garage, the time the reconstruction confirmed, since the fifth. When he entered the office, there was no argument: the judge remembers that there was a relationship of trust.
The course of the dried trail of blood on his temple, the complete absence of wounds or traces of the dead body’s fall, even the disjointed folds in his trousers indicate to the judge that the person who took his life was the one who took his life who dumped him in the ground. The shot’s trajectory, slightly back-to-front and top-to-bottom on the skull, seems very forced for a suicide bomber. The shot was not even at close range, but from a distance of about 10 centimeters, which also does not fit the autolysis.
Analysis by various Guardia Civil and Police laboratories concluded that gunpowder and bullet residue were in unlikely places and “in much larger quantities” than those corresponding to a single flash. The crime scene was allegedly tampered with. The court order, which the defense has already appealed, said one brother did everything while the other walked slowly between the street and the police station, facing the CCTV cameras with the “intent” to be seen. However, Bernardo’s mobile terminal places him in some of the city’s sports facilities that afternoon. He receives calls and wake-up calls, including from Roi, who offers to buy him the same sweatshirt, but according to the car, he doesn’t answer.
Eva Armesto concedes that stripping the crime of the suicidal guise allegedly donned by these two “intelligent” professionals with visual inspection experience was “extraordinarily difficult”. And to do this, he selects certain parts from every report he receives over the years, which he later puts together to form his story. Among the circumstantial evidence, the lecturer sees “unique probative value” in the discovery of the brothers’ DNA on a piece of paper containing gunpowder that turned up under the body, or in the fact that the capsule from the crime scene was identical to another one found at the crime scene cash of the persecuted was confiscated. It is also notable that one of the twins bought the Nikon camera from MediaMarkt that was later used to take the photo that was attached to an anonymous message about the 2014 gun theft.
A living hand after brain death
One of the biggest unknowns in the case had to be solved using target practice, reports from the Guardia Civil and the police, and data from the Supreme Council for Scientific Research. It had to be checked whether it was possible for Celso Blanco to perform “with his head smashed” an act already so absurd for him as removing the magazine from the suicide gun (which had been stolen without this), or if he could if you without magazine is fired, voluntarily pull the trigger with your finger so that the ejection port slide remains open. The car defends that neither option is possible. “With this type of weapon, the ejection port always remains closed when firing without a magazine,” the reports read. It would take a bullet “1,066 milliseconds” to travel 26 centimeters (the 10 centimeter distance from the shot plus the head) and “that’s when the serious head injury occurs,” the judge explains. But “the nerve connections between the brain and upper extremities” require “a minimum time of 10.37 milliseconds”.