Cintia Rocho has become one of the new names that have come to the forefront of the Leire Díez case. Her appearance is not casual: she is a woman from Badajoz linked to the Rocho family, a surname known for years due to police investigations into drug trafficking in the city, and whose father, Jesús Rocho Sosa, was shot dead in December 2024.
Her husband, known as 'El Tutu', had been murdered ten months earlier. Rocho also gained notoriety in 2024 after presenting a winning ONCE coupon worth 17 million euros. Now she returns to the headlines for a very different reason: her testimony about the alleged contacts to obtain private information about Judge Beatriz Biedma. Artículo 14 and Euronews have reconstructed her trajectory this Tuesday and have collected the statements she has made in recent days.
The connection to the Leire Díez case goes precisely through Biedma. The magistrate instructed the case against David Sánchez, brother of the President of the Government, and days ago requested to appear as a private prosecution in the investigation of the National Court about the alleged plot linked to Díez. In her writing, Biedma claims that the UCO identified her as one of the targets of that alleged plot and reports that there would have been contacts with people linked to a known clan from Badajoz to obtain information about her and discredit her or remove her from her investigations.
Data about Judge Biedma
It is at this point that Rocho appears: according to her statement to the program El Tiempo Justo, a person she places in the environment of Leire Díez would have provided her with data about Biedma, including photographs of the magistrate, information about her home, her car, and the gym she attended. Euronews reports that Rocho interpreted the sending of that data as a possible signal that they wanted to act against the judge.
The interest of her testimony lies in that it names and provides a personal account of a connection that until now appeared fundamentally in judicial documents and police reports. Rocho claims that she received several calls from people who introduced themselves as a magistrate and a lawyer and that, after initially talking about her family's judicial problems, they began to provide her with information about Biedma. She states that she came to interpret that they intended to "get her out of the way," although she acknowledges that no one gave her an explicit instruction on what to do with that information. That nuance is important: her statement does not alone demonstrate that there was a plan to physically intimidate the judge nor does it identify the person from Díez's environment who supposedly provided her with the information. What it does is provide testimony that fits with a line that was already being examined by the investigation.
And there lies Rocho's importance in the case. Judge Biedma had already reported to the National Court that the alleged plot had attempted to obtain information about her and sought ways to discredit her or remove her from the investigation of David Sánchez; furthermore, the UCO had recorded that businessman Joaquín Parra stated that Leire Díez had asked him for information or contacts that could affect the magistrate's reputation.
Now, Cintia Rocho's account introduces an additional element: the person to whom that information supposedly reached and who claims to have received it directly. It will be the judicial investigation that must determine who made those contacts, on whose behalf, and for what purpose.
But her appearance changes the narrative: what until now was known fundamentally through reports, judicial writings, and notes attributed to Leire Díez also acquires the testimony of a protagonist who claims to have been on the other side of those communications.