The vehicle with which the terrorists rammed several people in the center of Cambrils, on August 18, 2017. Jaume Sellart (EFE)
On August 18, 2017, around 1 in the morning, eight hours after a van driven by Younes Abouyaaquoub went down to an open grave down Barcelona's Rambla leaving a trail of 15 dead and 131 injured, a black Audi A3 with five terrorists on board tried to cause a second massacre on the Paseo Marítimo de Cambrils, Tarragona, at that time filled to overflowing with a festive crowd.
The Islamists belonged to the same cell as Abouyaaquoub and, upon reaching the Nautical Club roundabout, they saw a couple of Mossos d'Esquadra, a man and a woman, they launched themselves against it and, after running over three vacationers, one of them who died hours later, and the policewoman, who was injured, her car overturned on the asphalt;
from within emerged the terrorists, shouting "Allahu Akbar!"
and armed with axes,
butcher knives and fake explosive vests, and four of them pounced on the policeman, who barely had time to shoot them down by opening fire with his service pistol and a submachine gun.
Everything was said about that anonymous man: that he was a woman, that he was a legionnaire, that he was a thug with a badge straight out of a Clint Eastwood seventies movie;
nonsense: he was a simple local police officer, an ordinary patrolman who had hardly fired a submachine gun since he left the Police School, and who had the misfortune to find himself in the wrong place and at the worst possible time.
that he barely had time to shoot them down by opening fire with his service pistol and a circumstantial submachine gun.
Everything was said about that anonymous man: that he was a woman, that he was a legionnaire, that he was a thug with a badge straight out of a Clint Eastwood seventies movie;
nonsense: he was a simple local police officer, an ordinary patrolman who had hardly fired a submachine gun since he left the Police School, and who had the misfortune to find himself in the wrong place and at the worst possible time.
that he barely had time to shoot them down by opening fire with his service pistol and a circumstantial submachine gun.
Everything was said about that anonymous man: that he was a woman, that he was a legionnaire, that he was a thug with a badge straight out of a Clint Eastwood seventies movie;
nonsense: he was a simple local police officer, an ordinary patrolman who had hardly fired a submachine gun since he left the Police School, and who had the misfortune to find himself in the wrong place and at the worst possible time.
"Since that night, I believe in God," an investigator who arrived at the scene shortly after the events told me years later.
“I have experience with weapons, and it seems incredible to me that this guy did what he did, and that on top of that, with the promenade packed with people, he only hit the terrorists.
I don't know how many innocent lives he saved, but what is certain is that he prevented a massacre.
In the United States he would be a national hero, they would have elected him senator by acclamation and sooner or later the presidential candidates would give themselves away for making him vice president;
here, instead, he is an outcast.”
Is the researcher exaggerating?
To answer that question, it is enough to review the specific news that Jesús García Bueno has published about our man in this newspaper.
In the months that followed the attack, which were the culmination of the
procés
, the Generalitat was too busy pulverizing democracy in Catalonia and placing its population on the brink of civil confrontation to worry about the providential policeman from Cambrils, who, by the way, was soon singled out by the cheerful CUP youth as the author of “executions extrajudicial” (courageous accusation to which some illustrious intellectual of the
gauche also surreptitiously added
indigenous caviar).
The truth is that our man was forgotten: neither he nor his family were protected from credible Islamist reprisals, he was not offered an alternative and safe professional destiny, he was not offered an outlet worthy of a job that until now then he had exercised by vocation and that he already felt unable to continue exercising, and he was sentenced to wander from administrative window to administrative window begging for the negligible benefit of a professional incapacity that Social Security only partially granted him in August 2019, and completely in November of last year.
"When I touched his arm that night, next to the Yacht Club, I thought it was made of stone," the investigator also told me.
“I was
shocked
”.
According to the plethora of psychologists who treated our man, over time the shock has not dissipated;
quite the opposite: he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, he feels anxious and guilty for having ruined his family's life, he suffers from insomnia, he lives in a sleepwalking state of hyperalert anxiety, he has great difficulty concentrating and the medical reports diagnose him as a “domestic, family, social and playful distancing”.
As if he were indeed an outcast, but an outcast of the universe, just like Wakefield, that desolate character of Nathaniel Hawthorne who one day left his house for no reason and was only able to return home, also for no reason, after 20 years.
In a recent interview, Major Josep Lluís Trapero, head of the Mossos d'Esquadra in 2017, declared that society had not been generous with the victims of the attacks;
it is a euphemistic way of naming a bloody truth.
The Cambrils policeman was the most secret victim of the attacks, because reality disguised him as an executioner;
The Mossos d'Esquadra abandoned him, the Generalitat abandoned him, in a certain way we all abandoned him.
As a result of the attack, journalism had the inevitable occurrence of baptizing him with the glorious nickname of "The hero of Cambrils".
Bit of sarcasm.
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