CRIME ON THE COSTAS is pleased to provide this opportunity to share information, experiences and observations about what's in the news. We encourage lively, open debate on the issues of the day, and ask that you refrain from profanity, hate speech, personal comments and remarks that are off point. Thank you for taking the time to offer your thoughts.
Spanish police fired rubber bullets and clashed with protesters gathered outside a court Thursday in the town of Huelva for the arrival of two suspects in the disappearance and death of a 5-year-old local girl.The crowds shouted «murderer» and hurled bottles and stones as the suspects _ a man and his sister _ arrived in a police van. Three police officers and two journalists were slightly injured. Two people were arrested.«I insist in asking people...
The suspect is a 42 year old Moroccan man and reports in Diario Sur say that several victims of theft have recognised the attacker in police identification parades.One of the alleged attacks from the 42 year old Moroccan led to the accidental death of a 77 year old German pensioner A 77 year old German pensioner, named with the initials J.G., has died from a blow he received during a violent robbery attempt in Torre del Mar on March 18. His body...
Mari Luz´s father, Juan José Cortés, gave a press conference on Wednesday thanking officers for their work in the investigation into his daughter’s death, and commented that he would not wish the pain he suffered in the 54 days she was missing on anyone else, not even on ‘my daughter’s...
14 Nigerians and 1 Chilean have been arrested by Police at Málaga following investigations into a ‘Lottery Scam’. Victims received letters, sometimes at their home address abroad, informing them they had won a lottery and were asked to supply bank details and a small ‘transfer fee’. Investigators have estimated that the proceeds from their joint operations could have exceeded six million euros in 12 months. As well as 43 mobile telephones and a quantity...
Santiago del Valle García, 52, has confessed to the murder of Mari Luz Cortés, according to news sources. He had already been questioned in Granada but was released for lack of proof. Santiago G. and his wife and sister, who had been neighbours of the Cortés family in Huelva, were...
A third of the most luxurious hotels on Lanzarote are illegal, according to a string of recent court rulings that are expected to lead to at least some of them eventually being demolished.The rulings by the Canary Islands High Court affect 22 hotels and apartment hotels built under...
Spanish authorities on Thursday launched a search for the two-man crew of a fishing trawler that has not been seen or heard from since setting sail for the Canary Islands from the southern Spanish province of Cádiz a week ago.José Quevedo, who bought the boat over the internet and...
Britons owning houses on the Spanish coast will have their homes demolished, it was claimed yesterday. The Spanish environment ministry last year announced an ambitious £3.5billion drive to protect the country's coastline from over-development by knocking down houses built illegally close to the shore. It insisted that there would be no widespread demolition of properties built before the relevant laws were passed. However, a campaign group set up...
Swedish super-band ABBA's long-time drummer Ola Brunkert was found dead in his Mallorca, home over the weekend. Spanish police say the gruesome death was caused by a freak accident in which Brunkert bled to death after puncturing his throat with a broken piece of glass. According...
Inspectors Alfredo Marijuan and Carlos Farré from Marbella were detained following an investigation into alleged corruption of the elite Udyco force, which saw 40 officers questioned.both are members of the Costa del Sol’s crack anti-corruption police force have been arrested for...
Spain is due to ask the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to return Gibraltar to a blacklist of tax havens that refuse to cooperate in fighting money laundering and other financial crimes, despite the British colony's promises of greater transparency. A spokesman for the Spanish tax office told EL PAÍS last week that the only fiscal information Spanish authorities receive from Gibraltar is "scarce and mostly useless," and...
Police believe five-year-old was suffocated before being thrown into riverThe autopsy on the body of Mariluz Cortes shows the five-year-old died only hours after she went missing on January 13.Police recovered her badly decomposed body from a river estuary in Huelva on March 8 –...
Colony of around 200 vultures apparently killed a cow and its newborn calf on a farm near Villar de Peralonso (Salamanca) yesterday lunchtime. It seems that the cow went into labour shortly before noon, but when the farmer returned to check on progress around two and a half hours...
The Spanish detective agency Método 3 has said that some bones found in a plastic bag at the bottom of a lake in Portugal are not those of the missing British youngster Madeleine McCann. The Portuguese Judicial Police confirmed that the bones are from a small animal.A search had been carried out in Arade reservoir all last week by seven divers who were working for the Portuguese lawyer, Marcos Aragao Correia. The lawyer has been working by himself...
Police in the Vega Baja are looking for three men responsible for a robbery at a petrol station near the district hospital in Orihuela on Saturday night and who left a member of staff seriously injured as they made their escape. The injured man, reported by the Información newspaper to be from Almoradí, was shot in the side and is now recovering after emergency surgery. It’s understood his life is not in danger.The robbery came after the owner had...
The Interior Ministry gave news last Friday of an operation run jointly with Customs and police in Portugal which seized more than half a ton of cocaine in port in Lisbon and led to the arrest of a British man in Alicante.He was arrested at a warehouse in Villajoyosa where he was waiting to receive the drugs which reached port in Portugal in a cargo of nappies The Ministry said 514 kilos of the drug were discovered in a cargo of paper nappies from...
There are renewed fears amongst residents of the luxury Sotogrande urbanisation in San Roque after yet another house raid, this time targeting a British family. In recent years the wealthy zone has been targeted by sophisticated criminal gangs. Sotogrande employs its own private security firm and both the Guardia Civil along with the local police have stepped up vigilance but seemingly without effect. The details of the latest robbery were revealed...
"We found two bags, one of which contains some small bones."We don't know at this stage if they are human bones. If they are, they look like they come from a child's fingers. They are too small for an adult. I can't tell you how many we found, because we didn't count them. "As soon...
Minister for the Interior, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, on Thursday asked for respect for the four arrested police chiefs, reminding his audience about the presumption of innocence.Two of the four National Police UDYCO anti-drugs and organised crime chiefs who were arrested on Tuesday accused of corruption, were ordered to prison without bail on Friday evening. They are the UDYCO chief from Marbella, C.F. and the chief inspector from Málaga, J.A.M. Instruction...
British girl was arrested on Wednesday while trying to sail from the Tangiers Port (northern Morocco) for Algésiras (southern Spain) with 10 kg of chira (cannabis resine).The drug was found in a cache set up in the front of a Spanish-registered four wheel drive vehicle, a Moroccan security source said without disclosing the identity of the British national.Some 70% of the processed kif (cannabis) in Europe comes from Moroc...
Baleares newspaper claims he spent 45,000 euros in gay clubs at the time he was Deputy Mayor of Palma The prosecution service on the Balearic Islands has placed an official complaint with the courts against a former Partido Popular councillor in Palma for allegedly spending public money in alternative nightclubs. The Baleares newspaper Última Hora claims that Javier Rodrigo de Santos spent 45,000 € in gay clubs using a Town Hall credit card between...
four top police officers arrested in Málaga on Tuesday have been questioned by National Police internal affairs on allegations of corruption and all say they are innocent. They are expected to be called before an Instruction Court on Friday, along with the two other suspects arrested in the case, a police interpreter and the director of a Marbella clinic.They are charged in a Police Internal Affairs investigation which began two years ago into alleged...
Spain's Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed Equatorial Guinean opposition leader Severo Moto to retain the status of a political refugee despite his implication in coup attempts against the regime of President Teodoro Obiang. The court revoked a 2006 decision by the Spanish government to lift the status of a political refugee that Moto had enjoyed in Spain since 1986. Had the court not agreed with Moto's appeal against the decision, the politician,...
Spanish police have detained four police officers, including three chiefs responsible for fighting organised crime, on charges of several criminal offences, police said Wednesday. The four worked on the southern Costa del Sol coast, which is known for the presence of numerous international criminal rings. The three chiefs were based in Malaga, Marbella and Fuengirola. The officers were suspected of keeping objects they had confiscated from criminals,...
Spanish police have arrested six Chinese citizens in the country's biggest operation against DVD and CD piracy so far, police said Wednesday. The ring was capable of producing 80,000 pirate copies of CDs and DVDs and of earning EUR 240,000 daily. Police discovered a clandestine production site and three warehouses in the Madrid region. Police have carried out about 20 major operations against audiovisual piracy over the past five yea...
Customs authorities at Tangier port foiled three drug trafficking attempts on Sunday (March 9th) and Monday, MAP reported. Officials seized a total of 129kg of hashish destined for Algeciras, Spain. The largest single shipment of 66kg was found in the vehicle of a Moroccan citizen living in Belgium. Authorities seized some 35 tonnes of hashish in Tangier in 2007, an increase of 26% over 2006. In related news, Algerian press reported that on Monday...
Former Croatian General Ante Gotovina went on trial at the U.N. war crimes tribunal on Tuesday charged with driving Serbs from Croatia's Krajina region with a campaign of murder and plunder.Gotovina, who is accused with two other former Croatian generals Ivan Cermak and Mladen Markac,...
Thousands gathered outside the Huelva crematorium on Monday to pay their last respects to the five year old. Amongst them was the entire team of the Recreativo de Huelva football club, where Mari Luz’s father once worked. Also there was the Mayor of Huelva, Pedro Rodríguez, who spoke...
The North African branch of al-Qaeda says it is holding two Austrian tourists who were abducted in Tunisia last month. The news channel al-Jazeera broadcast two audio recordings featuring a spokesperson for the terrorist organisation. He said that al-Qaeda will soon issue demands for their release.The spokesperson also said that the two Austrian hostages were in good health, but warned that Western tourists in Tunisia will nowhere be safe from militant...
Headlines in the Spanish press confirm the worst fears that the body of Mari Luz the little girl from Huelva has been found by a petrochemical worker on the salt marshes outside Huelva.La Guardia Civil confirma que el cadáver de la niña localizado en Huelva es el de Mari Luz.the Civil Guard today located in an undetermined point of the Huelva coast the body of a girl who could be Mari Luz, the girl from Huelva who disappeared from Huelva in the 13...
Although Spain is maintaining its position as one of the most economically productive countries in Europe, it also now holds the second-highest rate of unemployment. The European Union's statistics office, 'Eurostat,' released figures stating that 8.8 percent of Spain's economically active population was out of work during January. During this month, the number of applications for unemployment benefit rose by 132,378 on the figure released for December....
The US State Department has come out with a report identifying Spain as the biggest drug emporium in the world. It's the highway for cocaine entering the EU from Latin America and hashish coming in from Morocco. 3% of Spaniards use cocaine regularly; one in five European coke users is Spanish. Spain has a higher percentage of users of not only cocaine, but also hash and designer drugs, than any other European country. Surprisingly, only three or...
Great news: Barcelona is going to license 130 small bars to put on live musical shows. About the only thing I don't like about Barcelona's nightlife offerings is the lack of live music, and now there's going to be a lot more. Ridiculous news: The city government is going to subsidize said bars with €600,000 of the taxpayers' money so that they can meet the soundproofing requirements. Just what we need. Government-subsidized bars. Only in Spa...
