Police Dog Detects €286,000 in Home of Alleged Front Man for Zapatero in Madrid
The canine officer Cony found the money hidden in 18 locations within the residence of Julio Martínez, a friend of the former Spanish president. The case forms part of Operation Tibet.
Cony, the police dog that dismantled the €286,000 hideaway
A six-year-old bicoloured German Shepherd was the key element in the discovery of cash that the National Police seized at the home of Julio Martínez Martínez, a businessman arrested as part of Operation Tibet. According to elperiodiquito.com, K-9 officer Cony, a member of the Canine Handlers Unit, indicated as many as 18 different locations inside the property located in the Salamanca neighbourhood of Madrid, where UDEF investigators found packages of banknotes concealed in unsuspected places.
The search was carried out on 11 December. The total haul amounted to €286,070 in cash, distributed across various rooms in the businessman's home. According to UDEF reports and an order from Judge Calama, he is identified as the presumed lieutenant and front man for former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero within an influence-trafficking scheme linked to the state bailout of Plus Ultra airlines.
The storage room: the largest hideaway
The largest concentration of money—€205,270—was found in a room that Martínez used to store moving boxes. There, Cony detected banknotes inside a heating radiator, where officers found €50,000 in fifty-euro notes. The dog also marked a Christmas paper bag containing another €50,000 and a golf club bag with €10,000, both in the same room.
In that same space, the canine officer located additional money in a chest of drawers (€30,000), a glass box (€25,000) and a toiletries bag (€5,270 in fifty, ten and five-euro notes).
The bathroom and living room: more packages of banknotes
The search of the bathroom yielded further discoveries. Next to a sports rucksack and inside a plastic bag, officers found €25,000 in fifty-euro notes. On the same bathroom counter, inside a paper bag, €49,900 in fifty-euro notes and a further €540 were located.
In the living room, inside a tartan travel bag, there were €4,550 in fifty, ten and five-euro notes. The hallway wardrobe of the property held another €550, which Cony indicated before her handler rewarded her with her favourite toy.
The case file also records the discovery of five white envelopes with characters that, according to investigators, appear to correspond to the Chinese language and whose approximate translation would be "10,000". Each envelope contained, indeed, ten thousand euros.
Five envelopes with Chinese characters
The five envelopes with apparently Chinese writing added a further €50,000 to the total seized. Officers found them during the same search, although the case file does not specify the exact location within the property.
A sense of smell one million times more powerful
Cony is trained to detect within seconds the smell of the ink with which legal tender banknotes are printed, with a sense of smell that the National Police describes as one million times more powerful than that of humans. The National Mint and Stamp Factory collaborates with the unit by providing ink samples, shredded banknotes and specimens with the same physical characteristics as genuine ones but without legal value, materials that handlers use in training.
The unit in which Cony works has participated in hundreds of operations against fraud and money laundering, with a high success rate according to the National Police.
Operation Tibet and the link to Zapatero
Operation Tibet investigates alleged corruption related to the state bailout of Plus Ultra airlines during the pandemic. Julio Martínez appears in police reports and in the judicial order as a presumed intermediary for former president Zapatero, although neither of the two has been convicted and the investigation is ongoing.
The investigation and news channel of Prensa Ibérica was the first to disclose the role of canine officer Cony in the operation of 11 December. Elperiodiquito.com also reports that Spanish police discovered that Martínez travelled to Caracas, a fact that forms part of the ongoing judicial file.
Source: Google News VE — Caracas