The commission of the Congress in charge of analyzing the jihadist attacks that occurred in Catalonia on August 17, 2017, has concluded the appearance phase without summoning, among others, the former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont or the former President of the Government Mariano Rajoy, and has begun drafting its conclusions with the aim of having them approved by mid-June.
Parliamentary sources cited by Europa Press indicate that the groups have opted to close the interrogations without exhausting the list of appearing individuals initially agreed upon. In addition to Puigdemont and Rajoy, the former Vice President of the Government Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría and the former Director General of the Police Germán López Iglesias, among other planned names, have also not appeared.
This commission was established on February 28, 2024, as one of the counter-offers included in the agreement reached in August 2023 between PSOE, Junts, and ERC, in order to secure the necessary support for the election of Francina Armengol as President of the Congress and to bolster a progressive majority in the Chamber's Bureau.
The same pact included another commission to investigate the so-called 'sewers' of the Interior Ministry, with special attention to the so-called 'Operation Catalonia', but this commission remains blocked and has not received any appearances for a year.
Twenty Appearances and Junts' Line of Investigation
From December 2024 to June 2025, the commission on the attacks has taken statements from around twenty people, including former directors and senior officials of the National Intelligence Center (CNI) such as Félix San Roldán and Luis García Terán; former Popular Party ministers such as José Ignacio Zoido and José Manuel García Margallo; as well as former Interior councilors, including Joaquim Forn.
Also appearing before the commission were former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, former major of the Mossos d'Esquadra Josep Lluís Trapero, agents involved in the investigation of the attacks, representatives of the victims, lawyers, journalists, and officials from the Ripoll (Girona) mosque where Abdelbaky Es Satty, considered the mastermind of the massacre, worked, and Mohamed Houoli Chemnal, one of the convicted individuals serving a sentence in Córdoba prison.
Villarejo, indicted in the 'Operation Kitchen' case and other proceedings, was the one who floated the theory that the 2017 jihadist attack "got out of hand" for the CNI, which at the time had a large part of its efforts focused on confronting the independence challenge in Catalonia.
The interrogations driven by Junts, the main promoter of the commission, have followed precisely that line. The work was suspended between last summer and February, largely because in November Puigdemont's party broke with the Government and stopped submitting new requests for appearances.
Before the Christmas holidays, the president of the commission, Txema Guijarro, a deputy from Sumar, contacted the spokespersons of the different groups to remind them that the Chamber had a commitment to the victims and urged them to decide whether to continue with the statements or proceed to negotiate a text of conclusions.
In February, the parties agreed to reactivate the appearances —four more testimonies were received— and last week they declared this phase closed. The Commission's Board has set June 9 as the deadline for each group to submit its draft conclusions, and on the 16th, a meeting of the commissioners is scheduled to vote on what is intended to be a consensual final report.
Paralysis in the commission on the State's 'sewers'
In parallel, the commission on the so-called State sewers has been inactive for a year. Its last session took place on May 19, 2025, when the president of ERC, Oriol Junqueras, and the former mayor of Barcelona, Xavier Trias, appeared.
In October, when its mandate was about to expire, the Plenary agreed to extend it for another year so that it could continue its investigations, but it never resumed its work. Two main reasons are pointed to behind this inactivity. On the one hand, Junts demanded that the commission immediately begin investigating the so-called 'Pegasus case' and the "police and parapolice activity of persecution of independentism for political reasons" which, it claims, "has continued under the PSOE Government".
The socialists rejected opening that new line and, subsequently, in November, Junts' formal break with the Government meant that the party stopped demanding the reactivation of the commission. In this way, neither was 'Operation Catalonia' deepened nor was the investigation into Pegasus, which this commission had inherited from another body created specifically at the beginning of 2024 to address that matter, but which ended up being closed without issuing conclusions, initiated.