Enrique Olivares García, in a file image.


© Editorial Unit, SA
Enrique Olivares García, in a file image.


Enrique Olivares Garcia, which in 2014 was condemned for assaulting the home of the former treasurer of the PPLuis Barcenas in 2013 posing as a priest, he died on Saturday in Cuenca at the age of 72, according to El Día digital and sources from his environment have confirmed to Efe. Olivares died at 8:00 am on Saturday, a day in which a wake was held at the Ronda Alameda Funeral Home in Cuenca. The funeral was held this Sunday at 10:00 a.m. in the parish of La Paz, sources from the Cuenca funeral home have confirmed. Enrique Olivares García was in the third degree prison, covered by article 86.4 of the Penitentiary Regulations, thanks to which he could spend the night at his home as long as he accepted that his movements were controlled by telematic devices. In 2014 he was sentenced to 22 years in prison for detaining the Bárcenas family a year earlier, tying their hands with cable ties and threatening them to hand over all the pen drives and information related to the process of the former treasurer to “end the government of the nation”. To enter the home, Olivares pretended to be a priest who came from the bishopric to speak about the freedom of Bárcenas -at that time in preventive detention after his fortune had surfaced in Switzerland-. After 20 minutes he said “The theater is over!”, took out a revolver and pointed a gun at the ex-treasurer’s wife, her son and the maid, as the court declared proven.

The ‘Operation Kitchen’

In October 2020, the false priest was summoned to testify as a possible accomplice in crimes of bribery and embezzlement in the ‘caso Kitchen‘, the piece of the Villarejo case in which an alleged espionage operation sponsored by the Ministry of the Interior at the time of Jorge Fernandez Diaz, which is prosecuted for these facts. However, the forensic doctor who examined him before he appeared determined that he was not in a position to testify before the magistrate of the National High Court. Manuel Garcia Castellon, so his interrogation was suspended. The judge was trying to find out if he was part of the Kitchen operation, which led him in January 2019 to request information about the list of visits and calls he received in prison, and about the identity of the people who had made any income in the accounts of peculio (deposit of money with which an inmate in prison counts), as stated in the summary of the case. Moreover, that 2013 episode was the subject of some interrogations in the context of the case. One of the defendants who was asked about these facts was the former commissioner Enrique Garcia Castano -considered collaborator of Jose Manuel Villarejo in his espionage business – who referred to the episode as “an Alfredo Landa movie”, something “crazy”, a “circus” and a “botched job”.

“a fudge”

The judge expressed his suspicions about that episode, which coincided in time with the Kitchen operation, and caused “many police officers” to be at the family home “for many hours”. García Castaño said that “things are not done like that” and assured that he “would never do such a botched job”: “If someone has done that, they don’t go with me, I have nothing to do with it, nor do I know anything about anything.”