Theft of the Pujol van: the thieves were looking for the Rolex

The thieves burned and abandoned the van after stealing 25 high-end watches.

Carlos waits, behind the wheel of a company Fiat Ducato, for the traffic light to give way.

It is 7:45 p.m. and he is a few meters from his destination: the MRW warehouse at the entrance to Vallecas.

There he plans to deposit the 369 packages that he has collected that afternoon in the center of Madrid: clothing stores, perfumeries, jewelers, bookstores, El Corte Inglés, the Spanish Association of Pediatrics and even the office of a court attorney.

But as the disc turns green, a black SUV appears out of nowhere, swerves in front of the van and sweeps it out of the way.

“Four came down with their faces covered by balaclavas.

They carried revolvers.

One stood next to my window and another next to the passenger's window, pointing their guns at me.

They started banging hard on the windows and yelling for him to open.

I got really nervous.

When I opened it, they dragged me out and told me to turn on my back.

One got into the van and the other three into the SUV.

And I lost sight of them,” Carlos told the police.

The driver assured that he was unaware of the contents of all the packages, but specified that there were "high-end watches" because he had picked them up at a jewelry store in the Salamanca district.

The armed robbery of the MRW van occurred on November 23, 2020. But it did not come out until a year later, when the case had already been filed without any clues leading to the thieves.

The event was then considered as a robbery of the Pujol family, because the vehicle was transporting, among other things, 35 devices - mobile phones, computers, hard drives, memory sticks - that the National Court had just returned to the family of Jordi Pujol, processed by the hidden fortune in Andorra.

Three days before the theft, the court investigating the

agreed to deliver the devices to the family because they already have a copy of all the content in the cloud and keeping them would be useless.

A solicitor kept them in her office on Calle de Velázquez until Carlos picked them up to take them to the MRW warehouse, from where they would leave for the office of Cristóbal Martell, the Pujols' lawyer, in Barcelona.

The Pujols saw in the assault on the van the hand of the sewers of the State, whose maneuvers to discover the family's dirty laundry are in the public domain.

They suspect it, among other things, because of the speed and professionalism of the assailants, who struck at a blind spot.

But no data from the judicial investigation opened for the robbery, to which EL PAÍS has accessed, points to that hypothesis but to a more prosaic truth: the thieves were looking for the 25 Rolex that Carlos had picked up in a store on Serrano street, one from the points on his itinerary just 500 meters from the attorney's office.

The value of the watches, which were to be delivered to buyers in different parts of Spain, amounts to 125,000 euros, a brand official told police.

The investigation did not serve to catch the thieves.

MRW activated the geolocation of an electronic agenda that the van had incorporated, but the thieves had dropped it in their flight.

The Police never had images from surveillance cameras and did not even know what car they used to flee.

The tracking of data from the telephone antennas in three points through which they are known to have passed did not produce results.

"All efforts were unsuccessful," concluded the police, which led the judge to file the case -investigated as a robbery with violence and intimidation with a firearm- due to the lack of a known perpetrator.

The agents did find part of the merchandise, scattered.

A few days after the robbery, on a street in Getafe, they found the burned Fiat Ducato and, around it, "packages scattered on the ground", including bags from El Corte Inglés.

In another scenario - a dirt road next to the M-45 ring road - five Rolex packages appeared... empty.

Which leads the Police to a conclusion: "The main objective was the theft of Rolex watches", he says in one of his reports, which points to a thorough preparation of the hit.

"They had privileged and detailed information on the value of the cargo transported, the route and the van that carried it."

The Pujols' devices were never found at any of the scenes.

The family would not even appear mentioned in the case if it were not for the fact that they appeared as injured.

He did so after his lawyer received a letter from MRW in which he apologized, informing him that the van had suffered an "incident during delivery" and alerting him that the packages should be "definitely lost." .

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