Charlie Smith
THE general secretary of right-wing party Vox has revealed there is still a search warrant for him after he pranked Gibraltar with a huge Spanish flag over two years ago.
In 2016 Javier Ortega Smith-Molina, 50, and a handful of other Vox activists unfurled an 18m by 11m Spanish flag on the Rock of Gibraltar.
But speaking to El Mundo, the military-trained politician, nicknamed ‘Rambo’ said he had still ‘not stepped foot in England or the Rock’, since the inflammatory gesture.
The former Green Berets soldier claimed he could still be arrested for the act, which was intended to question Gibraltar’s sovereignty.
“If someday I want to go to London, I will be uncertain until the last minute,” he said. “What is clear though is that they will sound the alarm on their computer system.”
On the day of the flag joke one of the far-right pranksters was arrested by Royal Gibraltar Police, while the rest all escaped, including Smith-Molina who swam back to Spanish territory.
The Vox number two described the ‘assault’ on the Rock like a Hollywood blockbuster and said it took two weeks to plan.
“We had calculated the time to the millimetre, where to climb, how to unfold the flag,” he said. “There was a lot of tension.
“In eight minutes we had to go down the mountain, where one of our group fell and almost killed himself.”
The party’s president at the time, Nacho Mínguez, was the man who was arrested, and was taken away by police shouting ‘Gibraltar is Spanish’.
He later claimed he was tortured by the authorities, but Gibraltar’s Chief Minister Fabian Picardo dismissed his allegations, labelling them ‘frivolous and vexatious and a clear abuse of process’.
