This decision, issued in an interlocutory order on April 8, responds to a request from the Associació Acció Cultural del País Valencià, which seeks to verify potential temporal discrepancies between the information disseminated and the activation of alerts. The magistrate has limited the request to broadcast times, ruling out metadata or information on the news production process to protect journalistic professional secrecy and freedom of information.
Concurrently, in another order on the same day, the judge dismissed the appeal by the defense of former councilor Salomé Pradas. The defense opposed a handwriting expert report on a handwritten document, arguing that authorship had already been recognized. However, the magistrate rejected the argument, stating that there is no formal recognition in court and that the law requires all necessary steps to verify the facts.
The case has so far revealed a lack of warnings at critical moments and a delay in decision-making, in a context where the situation was already serious in several affected municipalities.
The handwritten document is crucial to the investigation, as it is linked to the management of public warnings. The instruction indicates that the mass alert system was available hours before the message sent at 20:11 and that more forceful text proposals existed. This handwritten proposal explicitly recommended immediate access to elevated areas, a stronger content than the message finally disseminated, reinforcing the hypothesis of prior information and action options that were not activated in time.
The magistrate highlighted that the investigation has revealed a lack of warnings at critical moments and a delay in decision-making, despite the severity of the situation in various affected municipalities. In this context, determining the authorship of internal documents and precisely reconstructing the chronology of events are key elements for establishing responsibilities.
