Spain: Guardia Civil officers face minor charges for Roquetas killing
01 January 2006
Charges of involvement in degrading treatment and causing bodily harm have been brought against nine officers who took part in a beating which caused the death of 39-year-old farmer Juan Martínez Galdeano in the Guardia Civil station of Roquetas del Mar (Almería) on 24 July 2005. Martínez Galdeano had gone to the Guardia Civil to seek protection after being involved in a car crash. The incident that followed was described in parliament by the interior minister, José Antonio Alonso, on 11 August:
today, it is already impossible to ignore an incontrovertible fact: a citizen who arrived at a police centre voluntarily on his own initiative experienced his death, inside the centre, after a long, violent encounter in which up to nine police officers took part, among whom was the leading officer in charge of the police unit.
An internal investigation and the autopsy found that Martínez Galdeano's death was caused by a "cardiorespiratory failure" caused by an "adverse reaction" to drugs resulting from "prior consumption of cocaine". This adverse reaction was caused by the "stress" of his detention, the blows that he received and the use by officers of a spray and an electric truncheon which are not part of the force's regulation equipment. The police officers involved face charges of treating the farmer in a degrading manner, and of causing grievous bodily harm. The autopsy stresses that "the injuries received or self-inflicted during the struggle were
in no way the cause of death" [emphasis, in original], as the death would not have occurred without the prior consumption of cocaine. The investigation considered that the officers had acted to restrain the deceased who had entered the station in an "altered state". Thus, neither charges of murder or manslaughter will be brought, in spite of evidence that illegal electric truncheons were used in the beating and it was partly caught on camera in the station's CCTV system. A number of horrified bystanders also witnessed the incident, which took place both inside and outside the station, when officers tried to force Galdeano into a van (see Statewatch Vol. 15 nos 3/4, Statewatch News Online, September 2005).
Another suspicious death resulted from a violent intervention by officers, this time of the municipal police in Marbella, on 7 February 2006, when a man who police sources claimed was semi-naked and insulting passers-by in a drunken stupor died after being restrained. The Belgian man's death was deemed an "untimely death" by a judge, raising concerns over police brutality and accountability in such cases. The Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos de Andalucía (APDHA) issued a statement in response to these allegations, claiming that the man was neither drunk nor behaving aggressively. Witnesses gave a very different reconstruction of the incident, arguing that the man's face was held down, preventing him from breathing, by one of the four officers involved after a blow to the back of his neck had caused him to fall. The onlookers reportedly criticised the officers, calling them "murderers", during the incident. The APDHA statement notes that only 10 of the 80 initial witnesses have continued to cooperate with judicial inquiries into the killing as a result of pressure and the threat of action being taken against individuals who insult or slander the police, issued from both police and town council officials.
APDHA newsletter, 23.2.06; El País, 7.7.06; Autopsy report, 3.2.06, available full-text from El País at:
http://www.elpais.es/elpaismedia/ultimahora/media/200601/16/espana/20060116elpepunac_1_Pes_PDF.pdf