Spanish police on Tuesday questioned staff at a steel factory in Basauri, near Bilbao, on suspicion of circumventing the country’s arms embargo on Israel, local media reported, prompting a Jewish group to accuse the authorities of intimidation.
The police action at the Sidenor factory was part of a “pattern of political pressure on economic actors for ideological reasons” and an “authoritarian drift and threat to democratic standards,” said the Action and Communication on the Middle East (ACOM) group.
ACOM is a prominent advocate of Israel that has challenged hundreds of executive attempts to isolate the Jewish state.
The interrogations were part of a criminal investigation that a judge of the National Court, Francisco de Jorge, agreed in October to open against the president of Sidenor, José Antonio Jainaga, the El Debate newspaper reported. De Jorge is suspected of “crimes of smuggling and participation by complicity in a crime against humanity or genocide for the sale, without authorization, of batches of steel to the company Israel Military Industries,” according to the report.
In a Nov. 12 testimony before an investigating judge, Jainaga denied “any irregularity in the sales of steel to Israel,” since the steel manufactured by Sidenor and exported to Israel was not “among the products subject to special control by the administration,” El Debate reported.
Spain’s parliament approved an arms embargo on Israel in October.
On May 14, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called Israel a “genocidal state,” and his country has intervened in favor of the genocide case that South Africa filed against Israel at the International Court of Justice in 2023.
Spain’s government has demonstrated flexibility in its enforcement of the embargo, however.
Last month, Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles defended the government’s decision to exclude aviation giant Airbus from the embargo, which forbids the supply of defense technology to Israel.
Airbus has production lines that provide employment to thousands of Spaniards at a time when the country’s unemployment rate is roughly 10%—about triple that of Germany and almost double that of Italy.
ACOM has accused the Sánchez government of turning Spain into one of the most hostile countries to Israel in Europe in order to deflect attention from the corruption scandals involving the prime minister’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party and subsequent electoral defeats. In its statement on the police action in Basauri, ACOM called on the United States to sanction the Spanish government for boycotting Israel because such boycotts “directly harm U.S. strategic, commercial, or security interests,” ACOM wrote.
Separately, the Socialists under Sánchez lost 19.5% of the vote at a regional election in Aragon on Sunday. The loss, which translates to five seats in the regional parliament, consolidated the center-right Popular Party’s majority. The right-wing Vox Party increased its vote by 55% to 14 seats in parliament—four seats shy of the Socialists’ share.
In an election in December in the region of Extremadura, the Socialists clinched 18 out of the regional parliament’s 65 seats. Their share was 28 seats in the 2023 elections. The share of the incumbent, center-right Popular Party remained steady. Vox more than doubled its seats, to 11.
