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.
A convicted paedophile, whose partner is accused of murdering their children in Spain, has been found hanged in his cell at HMP Manchester. Former TV psychic Martin Smith, 46, originally from North Shields, was jailed for 16 years in March 2011 for raping a girl aged under 16 in Cumbria. His partner Lianne Smith is in custody accused of murdering their two children in Lloret de Mar, Spain. Greater Manchester Police said his death was not...
ON WEDNESDAY NIGHT WE DANCE SALSA IN BUDDHA MARBELLA! EVERY WEDNESDAY come and move your body to the rhythm of salsa music in Buddha (Marbella)! The whole Nicolas Valiente Dance Academy will be there too… You don’t want to miss it! Buddha Bar, Marbella Avenida del Mar marbella 29...
On a crisp Saturday morning last fall, Luis Valciente and Mercedes Martin enjoyed the quiet of their farm about 20 miles northeast of Seville. The retired husband and wife bought their patch of land in 1987, several years before Spain's first high-speed trains started running between Madrid and Seville. "It's very tranquil, which is what we like after all these years," Martin said through an interpreter. Without warning, a loud "swoosh" briefly...
Considering how many of his friends are unemployed, electrician Javier Ramirez felt like he'd hit the jackpot when his company scored a contract for government buildings here in Spain's sprawling capital. He gets paid by the hour, and rewiring 250-year-old marble halls is a formidable job that should feed his family for years. The problem is, Ramirez worked only about half of last month, and the time off wasn't his choice. It was courtesy...
Spain’s economy contracted in the fourth quarter and will shrink 1.5 percent this year, the Bank of Spain estimated, undermining government efforts to cut the budget deficit amid the second recession in two years. Gross domestic product fell 0.3 percent in the quarter, the most in two years, and grew 0.3 percent from a year earlier, the Madrid-based Bank of Spain said today in its monthly bulletin. Economic output may decline this year as unemployment...
On Thursday afternoon, a Spanish court is to hand down the sentence in the case of a bus crash that left nine Finnish tourists dead in April 2008. The criminal court in Málaga is to sentence the driver of an SUV. The drunk driver caused the accident by crashing into the bus on a motorway on the Costa del Sol. Thirty-eight people were injured. The prosecutor is seeking a four-year prison term and a six-year driving ban for the man, who was 27...
Spain's most famous judge, the charismatic and controversial investigating magistrate Baltasar Garzón, sat in the dock at the country's supreme court on Tuesday morning to face charges that may bring his career to an abrupt and dramatic end. Garzón, who ordered the arrest in London of Chile's General Pinochet, entered the court wearing his judge's gown for what may be one of the last times, as he faces being struck off as a magistrate for...
Mr Schettino 'attempted to take a taxi away from the scene' • Crew 'began evacuation before captain's orders' • Number of missing passengers and crew rises to 29 • Navy blasting holes in hull to improve access to divers • Captain due to appear in court this morning • Minister warns of ecological disaster According to reports in Italian media, Captain Francesco Schettino was attempting to catch a taxi away from the scene. “What do you...
Britons who live abroad currently have no voting rights if they have been out of the country for more than 15 years An estimated 5.6 million Britons currently live abroad but, under UK law, those who have been out of the country for more than 15 years have no right to vote in British elections. There has been support for changes to the law in a recent debate on electoral reform in the House of Lords. The Telegraph reports this week on a comment...
23 year old Briton has been arrested in Campillos, Málaga, by the Guardia Civil in connection with a hit and run accident at a petrol station in Gillena Sevilla last Thursday. A petrol station worker was injured and had to be admitted to the Virgen del Rocio Hospital, and the driver failed to stop. The Briton lives in Campillos and has been named with the initials W.A.F., and has been taken to Sevilla to attend the court which has charge of...
The National Court will not be investigating the mortgage fraud which was reported last year by twenty foreign residents of the Costa del Sol and which affected victims all along the Spanish coastline. Most of the banks and foreign financial advisors involved were from Denmark who informed their clients that, if they died without a mortgage on their Spanish property, their heirs would be subject to hefty inheritance taxes which they would...
Spanish woman resident in Valencia, named by EFE as Carolina A.G., has been ordered by a local court to return her children to their father in the UK, where the family moved in 2008. Her estranged husband is a Nigerian man who obtained Spanish nationality after they married in Spain in 2003. The couple has three children, now aged 8 and 5 years old and, the youngest, just 4 months. Their mother says she has suffered abuse from her husband...
Spanish tourism received a welcome boost last week with UK travel agents reporting a rise in interest and bookings to the country. The news came when on Friday the Post Office revealed evidence that resort prices have crashed by as much as 40% compared to 5 years ago. That, combined with political unrest in some other popular tourist destinations and the fact that the pound is at a 2 year high against the euro has once again made Spain an affordable...
He indicted late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet on genocide charges and became an instant hero to many around the world. A decade later he launched a similar crimes-against-humanity probe over atrocities by the right-wing victors of Spain's Civil War. Now Judge Baltasar Garzon is finding himself in the dock. On Tuesday, Garzon goes on trial for allegedly ordering illegal jailhouse wiretaps in a domestic corruption probe. A week later he...
French police acting alongside Spanish counterparts have arrested three men at a railway station in France on suspicion of belonging to Basque separatist group ETA, the Interior Ministry said Sunday. One of those arrested in Joigny, 150 kilometers (93 miles) southeast of Paris, was identified as 33-year-old Jon Echeverria Oyarbide, for whom there is an international arrest warrant. Police said he was in possession of material...
Anthony Read was found dead in the sea in the port town of Puerto De La Duquesa – on the country’s Costa del Sol – the morning after a night out drinking with friends in March last year.Yesterday, at an inquest, mum and dad Jacqueline Jenkins and Martin Read criticised the investigation into the tragedy carried out by the authorities in Spain.Anthony, 33, had visited a number of pubs during the evening and took a taxi back to a pal’s home ten...
THE days of the Costa del Crime could be seriously numbered. Or at least, so say the Spanish police. Detectives in Malaga have revealed that a year-long crackdown on British and Irish fugitives is paying off and Malaga is no longer an ideal hideout for wanted criminals. The clampdown, which came in a series of on-the-spot raids on pubs, bars and shops on the Costa del Sol, has drawn considerable success. In total, dozens of wanted fugitives...
The Costa Concordia lies on its side after running aground off the west coast of Italy at Giglio island. Photograph: ReutersThe Italian captain of a ship that sank off the coast of Tuscany was placed under arrest after one of the most dramatic holiday cruise disasters ever seen in...
Pilots from the SEPLA union who work for Iberia have announced three more days of strike action on January 25, 27 and 30. It follows four days of previous action in protest at the plans by Iberia to establish a new low-cost carrier, Iberia Express. SEPLA say that they have picked the dates with care, so as not to affect the Spanish tourism fair, FITUR, which runs in Madrid between the 18th and 22nd of this month. Meanwhile cabin crew and...
According to Hillen “It’s possible that this fireworks display will dazzle some but if you look at the detail of the Decree you will see that it does not help those with ongoing court proceedings, where perhaps the majority could face the chop”. “If what the Junta wants is more cases like the Priors, the decree certainly does nothing to prevent that” she added. “Actually, I sometimes despair at how little the administration is in contact...
The current and controversial ‘Ley de Costas’ has been in force since 1988 with hardly any modifications. Now the new Minister for Agriculture, Foodstuffs and the Environment, Miguel Arias Cañete, has indicated that ‘very deep reforms’ are on the way to bring value to the coast. El País reoprts that at an event to welcome top civil servants in his department, he gave a speech which indicated that the environment cannot stop economic development,...
A furious row broke out between two passengers on a packed jumbo jet after one reclined his seat as the man behind was about to eat. The pair almost came to blows at 40,000ft as shocked travellers looked on. It started when an 18-year-old sitting in economy class moved his seat back to sleep. Air rage: The drama happened on board an Emirates 517-seat Airbus A380 - the world's biggest commercial airliner - from Dubai into Manchester Airport...
A National Police operation has seized more than 4 million € in cash and a treasure trove of gold ingots from a group of drug traffickers based in the north west of Madrid which was finalising a deal to sell off half a ton of cocaine. Three suspects from Colombia have been arrested, who also face charges of money laundering. The Interior Ministry said in a press release on Tuesday that the drugs were brought into Spain by air and the laundered...
An arrest has been made in the case of the woman who was found dead, wrapped in plastic and a blanket, beneath a bridge in Los Boliches, Fuengirola, on Monday morning. She was identified as E.U.G, a woman who was born in Almería in 1980. She is believed to have been killed last Saturday, two days before her body was found. The autopsy has now confirmed the cause of death as asphyxiation, and it’s understood there were also signs that she had...
Another twist in the Malaya case with the owner of the real estate promoter, AIFOS, Jesús Ruiz Casado, telling the court on Wednesday that, despite his declaration on Tuesday that he had never made any payments to the Marbella Municipal Real Estate Assessor, Juan Antonio Roca, that in fact he did make the payment ‘of some amounts’ through his commercial director, Francisco García Lebrón. Casado explained that he had found a 135,000 € mismatch...
.The mid-Andalusian coastline began to lure Northern European types, weary of their long, dark winters and eager to bask in the region's ever-present sunshine. First came the super-rich and famous (think Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Laurence Olivier), after Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe-Langenburg opened the aristocratic Marbella Club in 1954. The demi-rich and B celebs followed, and gradually the masses—as is their wont—caught wind of the...
The covert activities were undertaken as part of an operation to infiltrate and prosecute a major Colombian-Mexican narco-trafficking organization moving cocaine from Colombia to Mexico and the United States. The undercover operation, detailed in Mexican government documents obtained by the New York Times, first came to light via a Monday dispatch by Times reporter Ginger Thompson. The documents "describe American counternarcotics agents, Mexican...
Banco Santander SA Chairman Emilio Botin lost a bid at Spain’s National Court to block three groups’ ability to file complaints against him over accusations he broke national tax laws by hiding funds in Switzerland. Appeals by Botin, his brother Jaime Botin and other people contesting a November decision to allow the complaints by the three groups were rejected, the Madrid-based court said today in a ruling sent by e-mail. In Spain, any citizen...
Spanish home sales declined in November for a ninth month as the economy contracted and unemployment surged. The number of transactions fell 14.4 percent from a year earlier, the National Statistics Institute in Madrid said in an e-mailed statement today. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, the People’s Party leader whose government took over from the Socialists on Dec. 22, has said he will restore a tax rebate for the purchase of homes to spur the...
