The leader of a drug-trafficking clan in southwest Spain has told Guardia Civil investigators that a member of the network around Leire Díez, the former Socialist official known in Spain as the party’s plumber, asked her to have the judge who investigated Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s brother removed from the case.
Officers of the Central Operational Unit (UCO) travelled to Badajoz on September 24 and questioned Cintia Rocho, head of the Los Rochos clan, for four hours at the local barracks, which reported the interviews on September 30. She said a member of the network had supplied her with detailed personal information about the private life of magistrate Beatriz Biedma.
Rocho named Luis José Sáenz de Tejada, a former judge struck off in December 2022 after convictions for domestic violence offences. He has since run a YouTube channel from which he attacks judges, prosecutors and journalists.
Investigators questioned a second man the same day as a witness. He is said to have acted as intermediary with a trafficker known as El Gitano, meeting Sáenz de Tejada in a café in Badajoz in late 2024 and taking delivery of photographs documenting the surveillance of Biedma and her two young daughters.
The trafficker was questioned in prison at 7.30am on September 25. He confirmed that his intermediary had told him the network’s interest extended to other female judges as well as to Biedma.
Biedma led the investigation that ended in the conviction of David Sánchez in July, when the Badajoz provincial court found the Prime Minister’s brother guilty of administrative malfeasance over a post created for him at the provincial council.
Spain’s National Court has admitted the magistrate as a private prosecutor in the case against the Díez network. Investigating judge Santiago Pedraz restricted that to a possible offence of slander and declined, for the moment, to open a specific line of inquiry into a note found in Díez’s diary referring to a judge in Badajoz, heroin and a clan name.
Pedraz said the UCO could not establish the significance of the note without further material. He is separately examining whether the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) can be charged as a legal person in the wider case.
Biedma is due to give evidence on October 8. Díez has consistently denied running any smear campaign against officials investigating the party.
The PSOE has said that neither Díez, a former member, nor Santos Cerdán, its former organisation secretary, holds any post in the party, and that it is not itself a party to the proceedings. The Guardia Civil and the interior ministry have made no public statement on the Badajoz questioning, which was first reported by El País.
