Four commanders and four legionaries prosecuted for covering up the death of a soldier

The Legion Brigade in surveillance work in Almería.Carlos Barba / EFE

The serious thing was not only the shot that ended the life of the legionary Alejandro Jiménez Cruz on March 25, 2019 in the Agost (Alicante) maneuvering field, but the orchestrated conspiracy to try to cover up what happened. The 23rd military judge in Almería has prosecuted the sergeant who fired the shot, but also a captain, two lieutenants, a corporal and three Legion soldiers for crimes such as concealment, disloyalty, disobedience and obstruction of Justice.

Never has it gone so far in the effort to unmask a flawed conception of corporatism that, under the excuse of defending the image of the Legion or protecting subordinates, ignores the victims and protects the guilty. In a devastating 150-page car, dated last Wednesday, the military judge breaks down the accumulation of irregularities that surrounded the exercise in which the legionary Alejandro Jiménez Cruz, a 21-year-old Majorcan, lost his life, and the lies concocted to obstruct the investigation .

Initially it was ensured that the legionnaire had been hit by the rebound of a projectile that entered his armpit, in the gap left by the bulletproof vest, while he was participating in an exercise of his company, belonging to the Tercio Don Juan de Austria, based in Viator (Almería). That is the version that the Legion Brigade commanders gave to the father of the deceased and the one that the Civil Guard was tried to believe. "It was a rebound, I have seen it thousands of times, you don't have to be a lynx to notice it," the legionnaire's chief captain told investigators.

Later it was learned that, despite being an exercise with live fire in motion, one of the most dangerous, the participants did not carry the ballistic plates that would have protected them from the impact of a projectile, although their unit had 30 of them since 2012 The judge admits that these plates were not mandatory then, but recalls that they were used in exercises after the death of the legionnaire.

The expert test also determined that he was not hit by a rebound but by the direct impact on the chest of a 7.62 caliber projectile fired by his own sergeant's HK rifle from 12.5 meters. To discover what happened, the Civil Guard had to break the pact of silence that was imposed between the legionaries.

Hours after the death of the soldier (in a military ambulance that lacked a doctor or nurse and whose driver only had basic first aid knowledge, contrary to what was foreseen for this type of exercise), the firing range was cleaned of pods and caps, which would have erased the evidence had it not been for the projectile being lodged in the corpse. The judge paralyzed an incineration that was wanted to be done in haste and ordered a second autopsy, which allowed reconstructing the trajectory of the bullet, which affected the lungs and the heart, and recovering more remains of it.

That same night, the captain of the company gathered the commanders under his command and told them that they must declare that he was present when the death occurred, which was false. The next morning, first thing in the morning, the police precinct of the shooting range broke and prepared a fictitious reconstruction of the events, having the legionaries rehearse it before the arrival of the Civil Guard, to make the investigators believe that they were four or five meters from your actual position.

It was a matter of hiding that, contrary to what he himself had ordered, the two platoons simultaneously assaulted the hill firing from opposite flanks, risking crossfire; that the sergeant fired when he had to limit himself to supervising the exercise; or that a lieutenant and a corporal joined the assault on the march, without informing anyone. But the trigger for the fatal outcome was an improvisation by the sergeant: with the exercise already over, a new enemy was invented and ordered to fire towards the slope of the hill. When the legionaries were kneeling on the ground, checking their magazines, Alejandro Jiménez was heard shouting: "They hit me!"

The judge prosecutes the sergeant for reckless homicide, but also for abuse of authority and obstruction of justice, and asks him for 330,000 euros of civil liability, in addition to maintaining the precautionary measures (withdrawal of passport and appearance every two weeks). The captain, to whom he attributes the responsibility of the plan to hide that the sergeant was the author of the shot, is prosecuted for disloyalty, concealment and disobedience to agents of the authority (the civil guards). The two lieutenants for disloyalty (they made a false report to their superiors), disobedience, against the duties of command and concealment, a crime that is also attributed to the corporal and the three soldiers, among others. All of them have been summoned to testify on September 7.

The courage of the legionary who told the truth

"Don't cry like a fagot, you've come to the Legion to die," the sergeant told a soldier friend of Alejandro moments after his death. The sergeant was the same one who had killed the legionary and who was crying the only soldier who had enough courage to declare the truth of what happened. He paid a high price for it: his colleagues harassed him, treated him as a "traitor", made him void and insulted him. The locker was forced on him and war ammunition was found inside, which he alleges that someone placed him, despite which he has been indicted by the military jusrisdiction. When one of the investigators called his cell phone, a legionnaire took it from him and threw it to the ground. "Oops! The lieutenant of the Civil Guard is calling me, how scary!" The captain scoffed, who prohibited the soldiers from collaborating in the investigation without permission from their bosses. "These sons of bitches, shitty picoletos, since they can't prove it was a rebound, they want to say that it was our fault," the sergeant instructed the legionaries when they were about to testify.