Charlie Smith
POLICE in Catalunya have arrested a man who plotted to assassinate the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.
Manuel Murillo Sanchez, 63, who is an expert marksman, planned to kill the Spanish leader over the planned exhumation of former fascist Dictator General Franco’s remains.
Murillo was arrested at his home in Terrassa three weeks ago after a WhatsApp user who he was in a chat group with alerted authorities over his repeated anti-socialist rhetoric.
A dangerous arsenal of 16 firearms, including rifles and a sub-machine gun were found at his property, although Murillo does hold a gun license for his job as a security guard.
He was apparently the top shot at the Vallés Olympic shooting club, but Murillo was silently plotting a ‘lone wolf’ attack to end the ‘red shit’, as he called it, of Sanchez and the PSOEs.
The 63-year-old painted himself as a martyr, writing in the WhatsApp group, ‘I am willing to sacrifice myself for Spain’.
An executive decision was made not report his arrest at the time, but Murillo has been placed in the Brians-2 Penitentiary Center in Martorel near Barcelona.
This foiled assassination plot is the latest incident in the growing tensions surrounding the exhumation of the body of General Francisco Franco from Madrid’s Valley of the Fallen.
Last week saw a protesting artist deface the former dictator’s tomb with red paint, before being dragged away by security as he shouted ‘For the reconciliation of all the Spaniards!’
