Walter Finch
THREE young immigrants who were beaten up in a vicious assault were targeted by masked attackers thought to be linked to a neo-Nazi group with ties to the Kremlin.
The attack took place near a centre for unaccompanied foreign minors in Madrid’s Hortaleza district on September 1, following the arrest of a 17-year-old Moroccan migrant accused of raping a 14-year-old girl in a nearby park two nights earlier.
A pair of hooded men assaulted two random minors and an accompanying adult who were staying in the centre, with one of the children requiring hospital treatment.
The incident has reignited Spain’s simmering racial tensions, echoing July’s violent riots in Torre Pacheco where far-right groups exploited community anger after a 68-year-old man was beaten by North African youths.
The Hortaleza attack was applauded by Nucleo Nacional, a newly-formed Spanish fascist organisation whose members are believed to have carried out the assault.
The perpetrators seemed to be specifically targeting vulnerable young immigrants in what appears to be a calculated attempt to spark wider community violence.
But behind Nucleo Nacional’s street-level thuggery lies a web of mysterious funding and international connections that has raised alarm bells across Spain’s political establishment.
The group operates from plush new headquarters in Madrid’s upmarket Las Tablas commercial district, with rivals from across the political spectrum questioning where the money has come from for such expensive premises.
The organisation’s leaders, notorious for hiding their identities and only appearing in public wearing balaclavas, were recently outed by Searchlight magazine as brothers Ivan and David Rico.
The pair are the sons of a wealthy businessman who previously served as a councillor for Spain’s main conservative Popular Party and now maintains links to the far-right Vox party.
Critics suspect the group’s open encouragement of street violence is designed to create chaos and benefit mainstream conservative parties, echoing the ‘strategy of tension’ employed by Italian neo-fascists during the 1960s and 1970s.
The group has direct ties to British Nazi circles through Isabel Peralta, European correspondent of the notorious Heritage and Destiny magazine.
Peralta has spoken twice at H&D conferences which link together a disturbing international network of far-right extremists operating across Europe.
The Italian connection runs deeper than many realise.
Nucleo Nacional founder Enrique Lemus is a longtime ally of Roberto Fiore, who heads a Europe-wide network of fascist parties and was a key figure in Italy’s domestic terrorism campaign.
The Lemus-Fiore relationship may explain another potential funding source for the group – the nefarious and destabilising hand of Moscow.
The inaugural conference at Nucleo Nacional’s new headquarters featured Koldo Salazar Lopez, a 37-year-old Spaniard who serves as the Madrid ‘Ambassador’ for Vladimir Putin’s World Youth Festival.
It was recently relaunched last year as part of a renewed propaganda thrust by Russia’s Federal Agency of Youth Affairs.
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The agency is the Kremlin body responsible for ‘patriotic education’ and organising Putin’s soft power initiatives abroad – including efforts to influence international youth.
Lopez functions as a direct pipeline of Russian state propaganda into Spain’s far-right scene.
His appearance at Nucleo Nacional’s conference suggests Moscow may be actively courting Spanish fascist groups as part of its broader European destabilisation strategy.
Russia has systematically courted far-right groups across Europe, with Germany’s Alternative for Germany party under investigation for receiving hundreds of thousands of euros from pro-Putin networks, while France’s Marine Le Pen secured a €9 million loan from a Moscow-based bank to fund her National Front party.
In Britain, Brexit-backer Arron Banks gave £8m in funding for pro-Brexit groups after holding multiple meetings with Russian officials at the Russian embassy in London, although investigations by the National Crime Agency found no evidence of criminal offences.
Moscow has also disseminated reports consistently favourable to Catalan independence and pushed propaganda during the Catalonian independence crisis, demonstrating its willingness to exploit any divisive issue that weakens European unity.
The cultivation of Spanish neo-Nazis through Salazar Lopez follows this established pattern of using extremist groups and separatist movements to destabilise European democracies from within.
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