The sniper who threatened to kill Pedro Sánchez defended himself before the Justice: “I am sentimental, not a murderer”

Manuel Murillo has declared that he is “a sentimental, not a murderer”. Son of the last Franco mayor of the Barcelona town of Rubí, he sat yesterday on the bench of the defendants of the National High Court. The Prosecutor's Office asks that he be sentenced to 18 years and six months in prison for proposing to kill Pedro Sánchez, president of the Spanish Government.

The crimes charged with him: homicide in the degree of aggravated proposition of ideological discrimination, storage of weapons and ammunition for war, possession of prohibited weapons, storage of unauthorized ammunition and possession of explosives.

Murillo, who is 66 years old today, was arrested in 2018. Then the Mossos d'escuadra, the autonomous police of Catalonia, intercepted WhatsApp messages sent between July and September to the group called “Terrassa for Spain”. [Terrassa is another important city on the outskirts of Barcelona].

When yesterday, during the first session of the trial, the messages were read at the Audience, Murillo did not seem to believe what he heard. He denied that it was serious, seemed to want to show that it was nothing more than bragging. Moreover, he was drunk when he was writing.

Murillo, a security guard, has told the court that he is “neither a mercenary nor a sniper”. That everything he said in the group was mere bragging. “I felt like a hero, like Rambo, and I said things like this to save Spain,” said the accused.

In his house, the agents who arrested him found an arsenal: pistols, rifles with telescopic sights, shotguns, homemade explosives, a crossbow, ammunition and utensils for modifying weapons. And a photo camera with a telephoto lens.

The intercepted messages, which were credited at the time and led to Murillo's arrest, were read yesterday in the courtroom of the National High Court. In them Murillo said that he had “[Pedro] Sánchez in the spotlight”. All because at that time in Spain there was an intense debate about the Government's plans to transfer Francisco Franco's remains from the basilica in the Valley of the Fallen, where he was buried, to a private cemetery in El Pardo (next to what was the residence of the dictator for 40 years).

For years, the Valley of the Fallen, built by republican prisoners, was a place of pilgrimage for nostalgic people who were nostalgic for the dictatorship. The government finally buried Franco and moved his remains in the fall of 2019.

“If they take him [Franco out of the Valley of the Fallen] I take [kill] Sanchez,” Murillo wrote. Or he would say: “My greatest illusion is to put Sanchez's traitor under Franco's tombstone.” Another message: “We'll have to go as anonymous snipers taking out those bastards little by little.”

Murillo didn't recognize himself yesterday in those messages. He apologized and tried to excuse his behavior by arguing that when he drank he got a “patriotic instinct [...] the feelings he had as a child, in Franco's time.” He added: “These were things that were on the news, I listened a lot to Jiménez Losantos [director of Esradio and Libertad Digital], who is also a patriot, and I was worried that Spain was bad. When I drink, these daydreams came to me as a patriot. This is all about killing people and I don't kill anyone.”

The defendant has said that he has no fixation whatsoever with the president of the Government, and as evidence he explains that you said the same things about the jihadists or José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero - president of the Government, also socialists, like Sánchez, from 2004 to 2011.

Regarding the arsenal, he clarified that he used it to practice in the shooting club in Barcelona or that he had the weapons as a souvenir or decoration of the house. The Mossos didn't think of their day like him. In fact, it was when they saw the weaponry he had that the agents gave credibility to the WhatsApp messages.

Murillo's arrest came after a member of the far-right Vox formation who was in the WhatsApp group where the messages were arriving went to the police. Murillo says he contacted her “in the belief that she had the capacity to provide” the “means and contacts to realize the plan.” She denied at the trial any relationship with the detainee.

The prosecutor in the case, José Perals, has argued that the accused “achieved personal conviction of the need to plan actions aimed at causing the death of the President of the Government as a way of defeating the socialist government” and that he “publicly and privately requested help to carry it out”.

“I didn't know what I was doing, but I didn't intend to kill anyone. I have not done the military [military service], nor am I a mercenary or a sniper. I only shot in a shooting gallery,” Murillo defended himself.

On March 29, the second session of the trial.