Man dressed as priest armed with revolver talks his way into house of former PP treasurer

A 64-year-old man dressed as a priest entered the family home of jailed former Popular Party (PP) treasurer Luis Bárcenas on Wednesday afternoon armed with a handgun, the police said after arresting the individual.

The suspect, Enrique O. G., has “psychiatric problems and a long record,” the same sources said. He reportedly managed to gain access to the property by posing as a “prison worker,” and on being let in by a maid opened a briefcase and pulled out a revolver, threatening the people present: Bárcenas’ wife, Rosalía Iglesias, the couple’s son, Guillermo, the maid and a security guard.

He is then said by police to have tied up the occupants for an hour until Bárcenas’ son managed to free himself, leaping on the intruder and disarming him. Once freed, Iglesias ran to the balcony shouting for help, while the maid headed for a bar in the street below the apartment. A neighbor phoned the emergency services.

However, Bárcenas’ lawyer described a much more violent episode with the intruder tying up and gagging Iglesias, her son and the maid and demanding “pen drives and hard disks.” The lawyer expressed his “worry and unease” over the attack and said it could be placed “in the context” of a series of recent incidents, such as the leak of a video showing Bárcenas in jail.

The former PP treasurer is in preventive custody as the investigation into his claims of illegal financing and cash bonuses to top party officials, including Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, continues. Bárcenas provided the case judge with a pen drive containing information that apparently matched data on payments by businessmen to the party over a two-decade span that were recorded in secret ledgers first published by EL PAÍS in January. The judge ordered two computers used by the former senator to be handed over for examination but when they arrived, the hard disks were found to be empty or missing entirely.

The governing party explained the absence of the data by saying the computers had been cleaned up in a routine operation to be used by other employees at its Madrid headquarters.