The judge in charge of the investigation into the management of the damage which caused 230 deaths in the province of Valencia in October 2024 accepted, according to an order notified this Monday, that the president of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, can testify on January 9 as a witness electronically, as requested by the political leader. The instructor wants to recount his conversations with former president Carlos Mazón on the day of the cold fall after the leader assured that his Valencian counterpart had informed him “in real time” of the evolution of the storm.
In mid-December, the judge accepted the request of the Association of Fatal Victims Dana 29-0, which is suing the private prosecution, to summon Feijóo as a witness and justified his decision by the fact that it could “motivate the comments” that Carlos Mazón “was able to make” on October 29 “following the conversations” with the Minister of Justice and Interior at the time, Salomé Pradas, investigated in this preliminary procedure, “on the information that I had received.
According to what the instructor said at the time, Pradas informed Mazón of the “seriousness of the situation” and the former president would have communicated key data on the disaster to the leader of the PP “in real time”. The flow of data would have affected “the measures that were being adopted by Cecopi (the Generalitat body that managed the crisis)”. The instructor refers to the sending of Es Alert, the massive alert to inform the population of the extent of the damage, which was sent at 8:11 p.m., when at least 155 missing people were dead, and which became the cornerstone of the investigations.
The resolution offered Feijóo the opportunity to voluntarily present the list of calls, messages, emails and WhatsApp which he received from Mazón on the day of the storm. In fact, the popular leader sent the messages he received from Mazón to the Catarroja court on Christmas Eve, the day of the tragedy. Feijóo only delivered the messages he received from former president, accompanied by a background document, but not his own, alleging that the judge had not requested them.
In this regard, Feijóo defended this Monday that she gave Judge Dana all the messages she requested and said that if she requests the response messages from the judge former president Carlos Mazón will give it to you. “I gave exactly what he asked me, the messages I received from Mr. Mazón that day,” Feijóo said at a press conference in which he recalled that the Catarroja judge’s request was voluntary.
In her resolution this Monday, Judge Nuria Ruiz Tobarra refers to article 412 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which Feijóo mentions in his request and which, in article 5, considers the possibility for deputies and senators to testify from their official office.
In this sense, the judge emphasizes that “she can only accept the request made, that the witness’s statement be made from his official office in Congress, by telematic means, in accordance with the aforementioned precept invoked by the witness, on which he relies, via webex”.
Likewise, he emphasizes that “all this without prejudice to the possibility for the witness to appear before this Court to testify in person on the date indicated”.
a dozen messages
The communications, according to the notarial deed given by the president of the People’s Party to the judge, began at 8:08 p.m. on October 29 with a brief “Thank you Presi” from Mazón in response to a message of support from Feijóo at the time president, sent at 7:59 p.m. This means that Mazón responded to the leader of the PP when the dana had already been wreaking havoc in the province of Valencia for hours and had caused the majority of victims and, therefore, refutes Feijóo himself, who had stated that he had been quickly informed by Mazón.
After the “Thank you Presi” message, Mazón added: “I’ll tell you later. Every minute is screwed.” Until then, theformer president He had not arrived at Cecopi, where emergencies were being taken care of. He didn’t do so until 8:28 p.m., according to his own account. “Long night ahead,” he wrote a few minutes later.
According to the documents, the Valencian president asked Feijóo for the telephone number of the former president of Telefónica, José María Álvarez-Pallete, to which the PP leader responded with the contact but apologizing for not being able to answer him because he was at an institutional event. At 9:45 p.m., Mazón continues the conversation: “We are overwhelmed, we don’t know what is really happening but we are receiving dozens of missing people and I cannot confirm them.” The last communication
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