In mid-October last year, a motorhome user made a macabre discovery in the Casasola reservoir, in the town of Almogía (4,269 inhabitants), very close to the city of Málaga. It was a sack inside which the body of a person was found with zip ties in his hands and cement blocks to sink it. Those who did it had achieved their goal, but the summer left the reservoir at very low levels, hence it was visible. A police investigation then began that sought to identify the body and solve what clearly pointed to being a murder. His tattoos allowed the first and the few clues found the second, linked to a settling of accounts related to drug trafficking. Three people have been arrested by the National Police, two men as material authors and a woman as a necessary collaborator. They are all in prison.
Police work has made it possible to reconstruct what happened since, on May 12 of last year, a woman reported the disappearance of her partner, a 31-year-old Albanian man, with whom she lived in the town of Benahavís “with a high lifestyle,” according to the National Police. She said that she had lost track of him in strange circumstances after eating together in a restaurant in Marbella. Then he had received a call from some acquaintances to meet at a sale located in the Malaga neighborhood of Puerto de la Torre. It was the last time she saw him. The investigation has revealed that there he got into a car with the two people who had summoned him and that they had headed towards the area around the Casasola reservoir. He didn’t know it then, but it was a trick to kill him as a settlement of scores in the context of international drug trafficking.
The agents’ investigations came across that suspicious bag that a traveler had found around the reservoir five months later, on October 14. When they opened it, they found a corpse in a state of saponification, a process in which body fat is converted into a waxy substance similar to soap by the action of water and bacteria, which preserves the body but makes it unrecognizable. The fact that his hands were tied with zip ties and that there were concrete blocks inside revealed that someone had not only killed that person, but also that they wanted to hide the body at the bottom of the swamp.
Despite the state of the body, some tattoos could be sensed. This, together with the clothes he was wearing – as his partner had said – and also the DNA results, made it possible to identify him and know that he was the young Albanian whose disappearance had been reported months before by the woman, who had suffered threats from a criminal organization to stop the search. The autopsy also showed the violence that he had suffered and that had caused his death.
The only clue the agents had was the car that the victim had gotten into when he was in the Puerto de la Torre neighborhood and which was captured by security cameras in the area. The vehicle had been rented by a 58-year-old woman in Barcelona. And his trail indicated that he had been hanging around the area where trace of the missing young man was later lost. The investigation revealed that two men were traveling in it, also Albanian, aged 36 and 45, who had traveled from Barcelona to Malaga to commit the crime. According to the National Police, they deceived the deceased to close an alleged drug deal, but in reality they only wanted to kill him due to a settlement of scores for a previous operation.
Both the woman who rented the car and the two alleged perpetrators of the murder were arrested last February, but it was not until this Wednesday that the National Police made the case public once the judicial secrecy of the proceedings was lifted. All three have been sent to prison. In the operation, searches were also carried out in the Barcelona towns of Vallirana and Vilafranca del Penedès, which allowed the intervention of several simulated weapons, several mobile phones and relevant documentation for the case.
