Abdelbaki Es Satty is about to board his old van in the port of Ceuta on his way to Algeciras.
It is January 1, 2010. In the double roof of the vehicle he carries 121 kilos of hashish.
The smell draws the attention of a Civil Guard dog.
The agents search the vehicle and arrest Es Satty, imam and frontiersman who, in the past, had narrowly escaped an anti-jihadist operation in Catalonia and who will become, seven years later, the mastermind of 17-A , the most serious terrorist attack suffered by Spain after 11-M.
From the Castellón prison, where he has been in preventive detention for a year and a half awaiting trial, Es Satty writes to the judge investigating the case.
He says that she has been the victim of a conspiracy.
That three brothers, Moroccans like him and residents of Cambrils, set him up.
He begs her to let him go.
He assures that he is afraid of what the brothers can do to him.
"I fear for my life and that of my family," he writes in a handwritten letter that is a farce, a strategy to avoid jail (and his expulsion from Spain) that reveals a manipulative personality.
Es Satty's request for freedom is not heeded and his explanations will not merit any credibility in the trial.
Although he manages to bring the brothers to the bench, he will be the only one convicted of drug trafficking.
Four years in prison that he practically serves until 2014. When he gets out, he works as an imam at the Charity Mosque in Castellón, where he tries to radicalize two young Spanish converts to Islam.
Later he will do the same, successfully, with a group of brothers and friends from Ripoll who ended up perpetrating the massacre in Barcelona and Cambrils.
Married and with nine children in Morocco, the trafficker Es Satty has a kind of sentimental relationship in Spain.
The woman, Hasna T., visits him in Castellón.
The last face-to-face is on July 23, 2011. The prosecution has then decided that it will also bring the three brothers from Cambrils to trial, who are furious.
According to Es Satty in the letter to the judge, Hasna went to see him that last time to inform him that she should withdraw the complaint.
"If they didn't kill me here or in Morocco," writes the imam, who asks for "judicial protection" and traces the same narrative - plagued by surprising script twists - that he had already transferred, in two other letters, to the State Attorney General's Office and the Ombudsman.
The alleged conspiracy began, according to the letters to the institutions, at the end of 2008, when the leader of the three brothers asked him to unload a drug boat.
It's Satty, who had already been convicted of smuggling immigrants, tells him no.
"I am a man with a large family and I do not want to work at all."
He received threats and suffered a beating leaving a restaurant in Cambrils in June 2009. They beat him, he says, for half an hour in a van.
They later left it abandoned on the highway.
"They believed that he had died," writes the imam.
“He was a hustler”
Es Satty's account has many gaps.
In his first statement before the judge he said that he was dedicated to bringing junk and that he knew nothing about drugs, although he did mention the brothers.
Later, already in jail, he alleged that he did it following orders and out of fear.
Fernando Márquez is the Ceuta lawyer who assisted him ex officio.
He “he said that he didn't know anything about the drug, that he came to pick up scrap for an order and that he felt cheated.
At the trial, the brothers logically said they had nothing to do with it and were acquitted,” he says.
Márquez vaguely remembers Es Satty as a “hustler”, who did not particularly attract his attention, even less because of any kind of religious rigorism.
The investigation into the attacks of 17-A and the subsequent sentence of the National High Court against the three defendants has not clarified what role Es Satty's time in prison played in his radicalization process and, above all, in his idea of committing a attack on Spanish soil.
The truth is that his link with jihadist circles goes back a long way.
In Jaén, he had coincided with the Algerian Belgacem Bellil, who blew himself up at the Carabinieri military base in Nasiriya (Iraq) in 2003. He also spent time as an imam at the Al Furkan mosque in Vilanova i la Geltrú (Barcelona). ).
He was one of those investigated in
Operation Jackal
, which the Civil Guard and the Police launched in 2006, two years after 11-M.
His phone was tapped for a few weeks.
But he was not arrested or tried.
03:41
Fragment of the trial of Imam Abdelbaki Es Satty
Until he was arrested in Ceuta, Es Satty dedicated himself to bringing things back and forth between Morocco and Spain.
Already in the Castellón prison, he directed the prayer of other Muslims and organized the cleaning of the module.
According to officials, he showed no signs of radicalization.
It was during his sentence that he received visits from the authorities who, after 17-A, helped raise the conspiracy theories.
In 2012, Civil Guard agents visited him three times.
In March 2014, before his departure, investigators from the National Intelligence Center (CNI) did so, as stated in the Penitentiary Institutions report contributed to the 17-A case.
Upon leaving prison, Es Satty was to be expelled from Spain.
But a false work contract in a town near Ripoll allowed the judge to annul the expulsion order when he saw the roots established.
In 2015, he arrived in Ripoll as an imam and contacted the boys who would commit the attacks: a bomb attack against the Sagrada Familia and the Camp Nou.
The plan did not go well.
On August 16, 2017, an accidental explosion blew up the house that the cell had occupied in Alcanar (Tarragona).
It's Satty died.
His disciples improvised and executed the massive outrage on La Rambla in Barcelona and the Cambrils attack, which left 16 dead.
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