The new Spanish nazi group Núcleo Nacional, whose masked leader was exposed in a recent Searchlight article, has wasted no time before trying to start a race war on Madrid’s streets.

They have close ties to British nazis via Isabel Peralta, the European correspondent of Heritage and Destiny, who has twice spoken at H&D conferences and is regularly promoted on its website.

On Sunday night masked racists viciously assaulted three young immigrants near a centre for unaccompanied foreign minors (MENA) in the Hortaleza district of Madrid. Núcleo Nacional applauded the crime on its social media channels and it’s widely believed that the hooligans were its own members.

Mystery money

Rival far-right groups as well as anti-fascists have questioned where the money has come from for the new Núcleo Nacional Madrid headquarters in the upmarket commercial district of Las Tablas.

Much of the speculation has looked in two directions. NN’s leaders include Iván and David Rico, sons of a wealthy businessman who was once a councillor for Spain’s main conservative party PP and now has links to Vox, a Farage-style party that has grown in recent years and now has 33 MPs and six MEPs.

Several critics on both left and right suspect that NN’s open encouragement of street violence is designed to stir up chaos, similar to the way that Italian neo-fascists implemented a “strategy of tension” to benefit the mainstream right in the 1960s and 1970s.

European network

Coincidentally or not, an Italian veteran of that era has close ties to Núcleo Nacional. One of the group’s founders Enrique Lemus is a long-time ally of Roberto Fiore, who heads a Europe-wide network of mostly tiny fascist parties.

This Lemus-Fiore connection might also explain another possible source of funding for the mysteriously affluent Spanish nazis.

On Saturday the inaugural conference at the new Núcleo Nacional headquarters will feature the Spanish representative of an official Russian propaganda outfit.

37-year-old Koldo Salazar López is the “Ambassador” in Madrid for the World Youth Festival, which Vladimir Putin relaunched last year as part of Russia’s “Federal Agency of Youth Affairs”.

It seems very strange that Peralta and H&D, who are supposedly part of the most pro-Ukraine faction on the European nazi scene, should be prepared to work with Salazar.

But as Searchlight commented when Peralta spoke at a conference of the pro-Putin Scandinavian terrorist group Nordic Resistance Movement, there are some strange alliances where Russian money, nazi politics, espionage, and subversion mingle.

Putin ally

Another speaker at Saturday’s Núcleo Nacional event will be Carlos Paz, the best-known Spanish far right supporter of the Iranian regime which has recently been allied to Putin.

Again, this is a peculiar alliance given that Iranian-backed terrorists are thought to have been behind the attempted assassination of one of the founders of Vox.

Peralta herself made a video (later republished by Heritage & Destiny) attacking Vox’s founders for their links to the Iranian opposition.