French National Gendarmerie

The French National Gendarmerie is depicted through its response to an overnight explosion at a cemetery: its personnel secure and investigate the scene, and its chief shares the emerging findings with Amaia Salazar and Jonan Etxaide. The episode presents the force as a cross-border investigative counterpart, but its account remains provisional, and Amaia challenges one of its assumptions about where the explosives came from.

Presence at the Cemetery

Amaia and Jonan arrive at about half past two in the morning, roughly two hours after the explosion. Explosives-disposal technicians have already examined the area, and the neighbors have returned home, but forensic investigators are still active. The continuing work makes clear that the scene has not yet been reduced to a settled explanation.

The chief of the gendarmes greets them with a mixture of courtesy and concern, warning that Jueza De Gouvenain would be displeased to learn of their presence. Amaia answers lightly that they are European citizens who happened to be passing and stopped to ask what had happened. After watching her in silence for several seconds, he agrees to speak with them. The exchange marks both the sensitivity of their arrival and the practical cooperation that follows: he does not conceal the local investigation’s findings, even though their visit risks crossing a jurisdictional boundary.

The Gendarmerie’s Account of the Blast

The chief says that a woman came to the cemetery around midnight, parked a high-end four-wheel-drive vehicle nearby, and placed approximately two hundred grams of explosive. The material has not yet been conclusively identified, though the investigators suspect it may be goma-2. He raises the possibility that it came from explosives used in mining, noting that the woman’s family owns a mine in Almandoz. At this stage, that is a working theory, not an established source.

The physical arrangement of the device suggests deliberate preparation. According to the chief, the charge was placed in a hollow in the stone slab, with a delay cord and a manual detonator of an old type. Investigators think the packaging points to obsolete explosives, perhaps material from before the Madrid attacks, left somewhere the woman could access. Its age may explain both its availability and its deteriorated condition, but the chief stresses that she knew enough to place the charge and set a delay.

Amaia’s Challenge and the Injuries

Amaia does not accept the mining hypothesis without qualification. She explains that, since the Madrid attacks, explosives are no longer stored in mine magazines: material for a particular blast is transported and guarded for each use by the Guardia Civil and explosives-security personnel hired by the company. Leftover material must be recorded and destroyed at the site. Her account does not rule out access to older, abandoned explosives, but it identifies a substantial obstacle to the idea that the woman simply stole them from an operating mine. The scene therefore produces two related but distinct lines of inquiry: the device’s apparent age and the means by which it was obtained.

The chief reconstructs how the woman was injured. After activating the detonator, she waited. When nothing happened, she apparently assumed that the rain-soaked ground had rendered the cord or explosives ineffective and approached the charge; it detonated as she came near. The injuries he describes are catastrophic: two fingers from one hand were gone, two others had been found stuck to the opposite mausoleum, one eye was unlikely to be saved, and she had burns and damaged eardrums. She had not lost consciousness. Despite those wounds, she dragged herself to the edge of the grave to check whether her children were inside. The chief’s account makes the aftermath more than a technical reconstruction: the failed detonation left the injured woman conscious enough to make the grave itself her immediate concern.

Investigative Role and Limits

The French National Gendarmerie supplies the scene-level account: the timeline, the placement and apparent construction of the device, the suspected source of the explosive, and the severity of the injuries. Its chief also distinguishes what investigators have observed from what remains uncertain, including the explosive’s exact identity and origin. Amaia’s response adds a separate procedural check, drawing on controls applied to mining explosives in Spain rather than treating the family’s connection to a mine as proof of access.

The force’s role in this episode is consequently concrete but bounded. Its officers are actively examining the cemetery and sharing information with the visiting investigators, while the presence of Jueza De Gouvenain makes the jurisdictional tension explicit. The scene does not establish a final account of how the explosives were acquired; instead, it shows how a local investigation and Amaia’s challenge to its initial inference can coexist as the inquiry continues.