History
With the intention of fighting against terrorism and several organized crime groups from Spain in the 1970s, on November 1977 the third section of Spanish military staff announced for members of the Policía Nacional vacancies which could be accessed freely for the newly formed Grupo Especial de Operaciones. The first training course began on March 1978.
A select group who had been months before in the GSG 9 base in San Agustín del Guadalix were selected to train this new unit. Colonel Ulrich Wegener, along with some members of his unit, took care of the equipment, the training and techniques which this new special unit in Spain would use.
The first access course of the GEO ended on 19 January 1979, with a ceremony attended by Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofía of Spain. On 23 February of that year the unit was announced to the press.
Its first planned operation took place at Madrid Barajas International Airport on August 1978 but they did not have to enter into action because the conflict was solved before their arrival. The GEO's first action took place in Bilbao, the 7 February 1981, in which five hostages were freed from two armed criminals in a branch office of the bank then known as Banco Bilbao Vizcaya. None of criminals, hostages or police officers were hurt during the mission.
GEO was responsible for rescuing Dr. Iglesias Puga, father of singer Julio Iglesias as well as foiling an attempt by ETA to attack the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. Aside from that, the GEO has disarmed several organized crime groups, arrested forty-one armed members of different terrorist groups, freed 424 persons who had been kidnapped or taken as hostages and boarded twenty ships used to carry narcotics to seize their load and arrest their crew.
During the 27 years it has been active, five members of the GEO have died. The unit has had only one casualty in combat, which occurred during the assault on the Leganés flat where the suspected perpetrators of the Madrid train bombings of 11 March 2004 were hiding. Having realised that they were trapped, the terrorists detonated bombs in the flat killing themselves and GEO Subinspector Francisco Javier Torronteras Gadea. This fatality was probably caused by the fact that the agents who entered the flat didn't know that the terrorists could have explosives.
As of 2005, the GEO was having problems with the number of members, which was below the necessary quantity. This meant that riot control units had to be sent to guard the Spanish embassy in Baghdad instead of GEO members, as originally intended.
Read more about this topic: Grupo Especial De Operaciones
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