The Spanish activist Jorge Jiménez has been researching undercover cops in social movements for years. Now he is himself under investigation – including on charges of breach of secrecy.
Since 2022, twelve undercover investigators active in social and political movements have been exposed in Spain. The activist Jorge Jiménez had direct dealings with three of them and became one of the most important figures uncovering this police tactic. Now he has himself become a target of the judiciary: two plainclothes officers stopped him at his car and informed him that he was being taken into custody. The allegations are falsification of documents and breach of secrecy. Jiménez made this known on Monday through social media.
That he was arrested and locked up in a cell for almost 24 hours did not surprise him, Jiménez told the weekly newspaper ‘El Salto’, which has published some of his research: ‘There is a clear intention to politically persecute and publicly denounce people who investigate these methods.’ The police also seized his phone and wanted to use its contents for their investigation. A judge reportedly considered this disproportionate and refused the request.
The police accuse the Madrid activist of having provided false information when making requests to the land registry. For his research, Jiménez had requested entries on property ownership, stating the reason as a ‘legal investigation’. But such an investigation did exist, since his client was considering filing criminal charges against police officers, his lawyer Daniel Amelang explained. These officers had ‘illegally spied on people in social movements’ and caused Jiménez personal harm.
Another accusation from the police concerns the publication of personal data of the exposed undercover investigators on social networks. ‘In the tweets objected to by the police, at no point is a person’s physical address disclosed,’ lawyer Amelang emphasised. Even if this had happened, it would at most constitute an administrative offence normally punished with a fine by the Spanish data protection authority.
Jiménez also rejects the allegations: at most, he said, he had published the city or district where the undercover investigators lived, but never their exact addresses. He and the newspapers ‘El Salto’ and ‘La Directa’ did, however, publish photos of those exposed. In 2025 Jiménez also published a ‘Handbook for Exposing Police Spies’.
Jiménez is a co-founder of the now dissolved anti-fascist collective Distrito 14, which had been targeted by the authorities since its creation in 2012. In 2016 eight members were arrested in a raid by masked and heavily armed police. This may have followed covert infiltration: one undercover police officer, now publicly identified, had been active in the collective for more than seven years. After his ‘deactivation’ in 2020, another was sent in. Jiménez filed a complaint of threats against this second officer – one of the rare cases in which action was taken against undercover agents.
‘It could have happened to anyone dealing with this issue – including journalists who research it,’ Jiménez said of the police investigation against him.
Published in German in ‘nd’.
Jorge Jiménez was held in custody by the Spanish police for 24 hours. An attempt to access the data on his phone was not authorised by a judge (symbolic image, Jerónimo Roure Pérez, C4 Picasso de la policía nacional en Valencia, CC BY-SA 4.0).
