Nine Years in Prison for Suggesting Sánchez's Murder on WhatsApp

Nine Years in Prison Confirmed for Threatening Sánchez on WhatsApp

A WhatsApp group named Terrasa for Spain. June 2018. A security guard, son of the last Francoist mayor of Rubí (Barcelona), expresses his outright rejection of Franco's exhumation. And, between messages, a repeated intention to eliminate the Prime Minister. This is the material that has led Manuel Murillo to a sentence of 8 years and 9 months in prison, confirmed by the Supreme Court. The debate continues: some see a legal outrage, others the only possible response to a man who, according to the group's messages, had illegal firearms at home.

From June 2018 Messages to September Arrest

The events in the case are concentrated in one quarter. Starting in June 2018, the convicted man posts in this group his absolute disagreement with Franco's exhumation and, in various messages within the forum and also privately, expresses his intention to eliminate the Prime Minister. The sequence ends in September 2018 with his arrest. There was no attack, nor attempt at an attack, nor a single material step towards one that the available information allows to indicate. On this basis—written words and a specific recipient—a sentence of nearly nine years is constructed.

The portrait accompanying the case adds layers: a security guard by profession, with shooting equipment at home and a handling of weapons that not everyone agrees on how to assess. All of this enters public discussion long before any legal considerations.

Is a Nearly Nine-Year Sentence for Threats Proportional?

This is where the matter ceases to be a case and becomes a barometer. The comparison cited in the debate puts figures on the table: two and a half years for possessing a pickaxe, between nine and eighteen for threatening the Prime Minister, and a notably more lenient scale when comparing it to tax fraud. The table is repeated with slight variations, and its conclusion is always the same: the penal code does not measure what it seems to measure.

Conversely, the explanation given from the other side is less emotional and more mechanical. The sentence is not based solely on words, but on the context in which they are uttered, according to this interpretation: a man with illegal firearms at home, sawed-off shotguns or military rifles, equipment that the law did not permit him to possess, which turns a bravado into something much harder to defuse. Some summarize the argument in one sentence: without the arsenal, he probably wouldn't have gone to jail.

And there is a third interpretation, uncomfortable for everyone. If the author of the messages had aligned with a different political current, argues a participant in the debate, the charges would have been terrorism, attempted murder, and illicit association, with a thirty-year sentence requested and a trail of secondary defendants for having applauded. It is a hypothesis, not a fact. But it explains why the case is read in terms of grievance rather than incivil law.

Is WhatsApp Private? Encryption and Denunciation from Within

The question runs through the entire affair: if end-to-end encryption prevents third parties from reading messages, how does the content end up in court? The short answer is that encryption protects the transmission, not the people on the other side. It is enough for one of the recipients to take a screenshot, save the text, and hand it over.

That is, according to the versions circulating about the case, exactly what peine: one of the recipients of the messages, then a local leader of Vox, was reportedly the one who brought them to the attention of justice. The detail is repeated insistently and makes the story more domestic than it appears: it was not a technological leak or mass surveillance, but a group of people who knew each other and someone who decided to tell.

It should also be remembered that major messaging platforms belong to corporations subject to judicial requests when a judge asks for them. The average user does not negotiate these terms; they accept them when installing the application. Hence the repeated conclusion: the messaging group was never a refuge.

The Domestic Arsenal Supporting the Conviction

If anything is disorienting about the case is how little the judicial narrative depends on the motive. Some argue in the debate that most proceedings for threats with weapons end in a severe penalty due to the possession of absolutely illegal firearms: sawed-off shotguns, rifles of military origin. According to this argument, when the threat is accompanied by real means to carry it out, the scale changes, and the technical detail weighs more than the adjective.

A minor noise has also surfaced, illustrating the informational confusion. In the video released, the owner of a gun shop describes the convicted man as a terrible shot; in the journalistic text, he is presented as an expert shot. The contradiction does not change the sentence, but it does affect public perception: an expert is a danger, a poor shot is a man with weapons at home and little skill. Depending on which version is read, the headline is different.

There is no consensus, and at this point, there won't be. What can be affirmed is that the case has served for something unusual: putting the penal code, messaging encryption, and a domestic arsenal whose existence is taken for granted in the debate, in the same sentence. The judicial outcome is closed. What remains open is the fundamental question, the one no one answers with numbers: how much of what someone writes in a closed group is an intention and how much is just the noise of a closed group.