One of those arrested for being part of the plot that dealt with the identification and repatriation of bodies of immigrants who were trying to reach Spain by boat has pointed out the Civil Guard in his statement before the judge investigating the case.
According to two sources close to the case, Francisco Clemente assured this Monday that the information he received and that he supposedly later used to charge the families came from agents of the Armed Institute.
Clemente, who was the only one of the 14 detainees that he has declared, said that he had contacts with Civil Guard agents from several provinces and that they provided him with images of the bodies via WhatsApp so that he could identify them.
The accused was arrested last weekend in an operation by the Civil Guard itself.
The agents investigate a type of funeral cartel that, in apparent alliance with Clemente, profited from the alleged sale of confidential information and the awarding of all funeral procedures to identify and repatriate bodies to Algeria and Morocco.
The network began to be investigated in Cartagena, but has tentacles in Cádiz, Almería, the rest of the Region of Murcia, the Balearic Islands and Alicante, destination provinces for irregular immigration from, above all, Algeria.
Clemente is currently free and the judge has taken away his passport.
EL PAÍS, which has been investigating his
modus operandi
and that of his alleged accomplices since the end of 2021, has tried to contact him on several occasions.
His lawyer does not have a working phone and Clemente refuses to speak to this newspaper.
More information
The pirates of the dead of the boats: the business with the bodies of irregular immigration
The images of the corpses, their clothing or their tattoos were the main raw material with which those investigated would be doing business, as they served to contact families who were looking for their missing relatives.
By sending the photos to the relatives, investigators maintain, Clemente confirmed with them whether it was the person they were looking for and began the second and most lucrative part of the business: convincing them to contract identification and repatriation procedures with certain funeral homes.
“They told the families that they were the only ones capable of repatriating the body,” sources from the investigation maintain.
They charged them between 3,000 and 10,000 euros.
The plot benefited from the fact that in Spain there are no clear protocols for searching for identification of bodies of immigrants who try to arrive irregularly.
Even knowing how to do it, families—abroad and without speaking Spanish—face many obstacles.
Clemente's statement in which he points out that the Civil Guard distributes criminal responsibility for the distribution of information protected by law, such as images of the corpses.
The investigations, until now, pointed to the officials of the Institute of Legal Medicine of Cartagena as the origin of the leaks to the plot.
Sources from the Civil Guard have defended the “correct action” of their agents without evaluating the statements of those detained in court.
Clemente used his social networks, with more than 150,000 followers, to disseminate explicit images of bodies, clothing, jewelry, scars or tattoos of the deceased to help the families of immigrants identify their missing persons.
He did so on behalf of the NGO for which he works, the International Center for the Identification of Missing Migrants (CIPMID).
For years he publicly asked for donations and, according to testimonies collected by EL PAÍS, he also privately asked for money from families.
Among those images were photos of dead people recently found on the beach, material to which very few have access.
The Civil Guard, a judicial secretary, a forensic doctor and the driver of the van who must take the body to the Institute of Forensic Medicine are present when removing a corpse.
In one of those published images, which EL PAÍS has compiled before deleting them, you can see several pieces of jewelry (a bracelet, earrings and rings) photographed on a Civil Guard template.
From what emerges from the investigation, it does not seem that Clemente obtained the greatest benefits.
The ringleader of the plot is, according to the investigations of the Civil Guard, Rachid S. the owner of a funeral home in Murcia.
In the search of his house and his cars, almost 70,000 euros were found.
Privileged contacts
It is not the first time that Clemente boasts of his contacts with the Security forces.
He did it informally, but it was also recorded in writing and he used it to gain credibility with the families.
Asked in 2021 if he was the author of the images that he was sending to the relatives of the disappeared, he responded: “No, the judicial police did it.
We are an NGO searching for missing people.
Of the deceased, the Civil Guard sends us the autopsy and photos to search for the family.”
Clemente, about to turn 27, had already spoken with the Civil Guard about his privileged contacts.
In proceedings regarding a case of an alleged criminal network that trafficked Syrian refugees and operated in Algeria and Almería, the Almería Civil Guard summoned him to testify as a witness on October 4, 2022. According to the documents to which it has had access EL PAÍS, the agents questioned him about the origin of the information he published.
Clemente explained to them that thanks to the “visibility” that he had achieved on social networks, he had a large number of contacts and friends, among them relatives of the immigrants leaving for Spain.
But he added that "other times" it was the Security Forces and Corps that "turned directly" to him, as the NGO's delegate in Almería, "to collaborate in the identification of bodies found at sea from immigration."
This Wednesday, the NGO for which Clemente works published a statement on
“CIPMID is a non-profit organization that collaborates closely with the State Security Forces and Corps, scrupulously complying with the action protocols,” she says.
In its statement, the NGO denies that there is any investigation against her and that the accusations against her are false.
They threaten to take “legal measures” if what they describe as “unfounded accusations” are not withdrawn within 48 hours.
The Civil Guard, at the moment, is not investigating the NGO, but rather Francisco Clemente, who works for the organization.
This can be easily verified on the NGO's website where she still appears as his collaborator in Almería and in the watermark with the name of CIPMID that Clemente put on some of the photos of corpses that he published.
In fact, in the proceedings of the Civil Guard in which Clemente testified as a witness in 2022, he made it clear that his collaboration in the identification of bodies, which he carried out on his social networks, was done “always through authorization and by means of the person who is above him, called Mari Ángeles.”
Mª Ángeles Colsa Herrera is the founder of CIPMID and EL PAÍS tried to contact her this Monday before publishing the name of her organization, but she did not respond.
The NGO's own account also published photos of corpses on its Facebook.
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