/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/KH4JMKGB4VFMJPNM342KIIG76I.jpg)
Police guard one of the 14 arrested on Tuesday in a screenshot of the video released by the Ministry of the Interior.
11 of the 14 Pakistanis arrested on Tuesday by agents of the National Police in a macro operation in six provinces against radical Islamism have entered a Foreigners Internment Center (CIE) to proceed with their expulsion in the coming days without waiting to be tried, sources from the Ministry of the Interior have confirmed to EL PAÍS. The other three arrested have been released. All of them were accused of allegedly being part of the structure in Spain of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a radical Islamist party with parliamentary representation in the Asian country that advocates the implementation of Islamic law and the execution of anyone it considers blasphemous.
Learn more
A radical Pakistani party takes root in Spain
The waiver of criminal proceedings against them and giving priority to their expulsion is based on article 57 of the Aliens Act, which provides for the possibility for a judge, after hearing the Public Prosecutor's Office, to authorize this measure if the person under investigation is accused of a crime for which the maximum penalty does not exceed six years' imprisonment. This is the case of those arrested last Tuesday in Operation Sakina 2 of the General Commissariat of Information (CGI), whom the police accuse of carrying out acts of indoctrination, apology and terrorist glorification, according to the Interior Ministry in a note made public on Thursday.
The decision also comes after five other alleged members of the TLP who were arrested and imprisoned in February last year initially accused of terrorism were provisionally released by the National Court after the judicial investigation reduced the accusation against them to an alleged crime of glorification, which is punishable by lesser penalties (from one to three years in prison). His defense lawyer had provided the case with a letter from the Pakistani embassy in Madrid certifying that Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan is "legal" in the Asian country and "participates in electoral processes." The Public Prosecutor's Office also found at the time that this group is not on the list of terrorist organisations in the EU or any other transnational entity. The police highlighted in their note on Thursday that this organization makes "an intolerant and violent interpretation of religion."
The measure of expelling a detainee for radical Islamism instead of waiting for him to be tried is not new, but in recent years it has been raised more frequently, especially in cases of self-indoctrination, a crime incorporated into the Penal Code in 2015 whose difficulty in proving in a trial has led in recent years to acquittals or convictions that are later overturned in the second instance by the Supreme Court. the courts. This has led the National and Interior Court to explore this other avenue, which, being an administrative process that remains in the hands of the Secretary of State for Security, allows individuals who allegedly pose a potential threat to national security to be expelled quickly from Spain. The Criminal Chamber of the National High Court has already ruled in favour of this measure in several cases and has endorsed the system.
Investigated since 2020
The investigation that led first to the five arrests in February 2022 and now to the 14 arrests last Tuesday began after the attack committed in September 2020 next to the former headquarters in Paris of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine that had already suffered a jihadist attack in January 2015 in which eight of its collaborators died. In that second attack, in which two people were seriously injured, Zaheer Hassan Mahmoud, a 25-year-old Pakistani who said he intended to attack the publication again because of its decision to rebroadcast cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. The French police investigation found links between Zaheer Hassan Mahmood and Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan.
That arrest triggered the alert among Spanish anti-terrorist experts due to the fear of being faced with a new terrorist phenomenon, especially after learning that the detainee had maintained contacts with a compatriot based in Barcelona. The investigations initiated then led the police to the first five detainees, who were arrested after allegedly publishing on the social networks Tik Tok, Facebook and Instagram videos with fragments of the radical speeches of leaders of the party that, in 2018, brought thousands of people to the streets in Lahore to achieve the execution by hanging of Asia Bibi, the Christian sentenced to death for insulting Muhammad.
After those arrests, the police continued the investigations into the possible presence in Spain of other alleged members of the party after finding in the records a document written in Urdu (the language spoken in Pakistan) that contained a list with the names, telephone numbers and positions of the alleged 15 main people responsible for the TLP in Spain. Those investigations led to the arrest of seven people last Tuesday in Barcelona, two in Gipuzkoa, another two in Valencia, one in Álava, another in Lleida and the last in La Rioja. 11 of them are now waiting in a CIE for their expulsion from Spain to materialize.