Between the confusion of his relatives and the serious accusations of the Polish Government, the case of Pablo González continues to be an enigma. When 12 days have passed since his arrest, the Basque journalist of Russian origin is imprisoned in the Polish prison in Rzeswów and has not yet been able to see his lawyer. Around him, meanwhile, they strive to unravel the mess surrounding his arrest, an episode that they link to his Russian origin.
News about González’s situation arrives with a dropper. Only two contacts in almost two weeks. The first of them was on February 28, the day of his arrest; then, he was able to call his wife, Oihana Goiriena, and asked her to contact her lawyer. Later, on Monday, the 7th, he received a visit from the Spanish consul in Warsaw, to whom he conveyed that he is “well” and reiterated his innocence. In parallel, his defense continues to work to finally be able to talk to the accused.
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In their surroundings, they assure that they have found out about the accusations that weigh on the journalist through a press release. The Polish government spokesman, Stanislaw Zaryn, indicated that he is accused of spying for Russia “while taking advantage of his journalistic status”, so that he faces a sentence of between one and ten years in prison for espionage. In addition, from the Polish Executive it was leaked that he was traveling with two passports with different identities.
His family refutes the Polish accusations; she adopted her mother’s last name and her first name in Spanish in 1991
At this point, his relatives strongly deny the accusations. Oihana, the mother of her three children, explains that her husband was born in April 1982 in Moscow and lived there until she was 9 years old. Then, her parents divorced and her mother, the daughter of a war child, set course for the land of origin of his father. They lived for a year in Bilbao and then moved to Catalonia. At the age of 23 he met his wife, settled in the Basque Country and started a family. Upon his arrival in Spain, his mother had registered Pablo
–until then Pavel– with his Spanish name and surname. Hence the two identities of his Russian and Spanish passports. This medium has been able to see a copy of the Civil Registry in which that procedure, completed in 1991, is reflected.
His colleagues at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) also allude to this biographical aspect, “something known to everyone”, and stress that for many of his friends Pablo is Pavel. In the Department of Political Science and Administration, where González is writing a doctoral thesis on the persecution of the LGTB movement in Georgia, they point out that this factor, together with his work as a journalist in Donbass in the last eight years, working for Public, The Sixth O Competitionmay have influenced his arrest, conditioned by a context of war and in a country like Poland, ranked 64th in terms of freedom of the press.
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This reading contrasts with the bluntness with which the Polish Government has expressed itself and with a certain coldness on the part of the Spanish Executive. The Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, has recognized this week in Congress the precedent that, a month ago, led González to hire Gonzalo Boye as a lawyer, advised by a friend knowledgeable in the field of international law.
The account of those events is as follows. While he was in eastern Ukraine working as a journalist, at the beginning of February, he received a call from the secret services of that country, asking him to appear in Kyiv. There, he was interrogated and accused of being “pro-Russian”, although he was released and returned to Spain.
Minister Robles has acknowledged that the CNI visited her family home, that of her mother and that of a friend
In parallel, while he was still in Ukraine, the CNI visited his family home, in the outskirts of Gernika, where his wife was with one of their children; he also visited the home of his mother, in the province of Barcelona, and that of a friend, in the Catalan capital.
“About eight people came, in two vans. As far as I know they didn’t record anything. They simply asked us questions and let us see that they knew Pablo’s trajectory, from where he had traveled, etc ”, recalls Oihana Goiriena.
Why these movements of the CNI? Robles has limited himself to pointing out that he respects the “presumption of innocence” of the Basque journalist, but also “the application of the Polish legal system, which we may or may not share.”
Nor has it been clear why for almost a month, once Pablo González returned to Spain, the CNI did not knock on the journalist’s door again. On February 25, he felt free to travel to the Polish border with Ukraine to cover the refugee crisis. Two days later he was arrested.
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