Seven arrested in Spain for spying on Martinelli's girlfriend

Seven people, including four agents of the Spanish Civil Guard, were arrested last Monday for allegedly spying on the “girlfriend” of former President Ricardo Martinelli) in Mallorca, various Spanish media reported.

The Civil Guard agents were from the Balearic Islands and served in the Marivent Palace, the Son Sant Joan airport and the municipality of Calviä, among other sectors. This Wednesday, they have been brought to justice.

The name of Martinelli’s alleged “girlfriend” has not been revealed, although she was the one who filed the complaint, once she realized that she was being watched by the agents, in July 2020. The woman is identified as a “businesswoman” who lives between Miami and Mallorca.

“This story seems to be taken from a movie script, but it is real,” wrote the ABC newspaper, adding that the purpose was to inform Martinelli if his “girlfriend” was unfaithful to him. “They even set up fake security checkpoints to stop her in the vehicle and identify the people who were with her,”

The newspaper El País indicates,  that the former president appears as being investigated in the case, according to police sources.

In addition to the four civil guards, the media reports that, as part of the investigation, an alleged soldier and the owner and an employee of a security company are detained.

The case is being investigated by a team of Internal Affairs experts, who traveled to Mallorca this weekend to carry out the arrests that were carried out on Monday.

The media report many details of the follow-ups, the group’s strategies, and how the former president would have participated in the acts reports La Prensa.

According to reports, the group would even have placed a geolocator in the vehicle that the woman was driving in Mallorca, in order to monitor her movements.

“The detained civil guards created a group on the WhatsApp instant messaging application called ‘Operation Cockatoo’ to coordinate during the surveillance,” El País said, citing the documentation of this case. Martinelli would have participated in this WhatsApp group, with the pseudonym “Zeus”.