This is a case that is difficult to believe because of the astonishing age of one of those involved in nothing more and nothing less than a kidnapping, which involved torture and ended with the death of the victim.

It happened in Alicante, Spain, between September 7 and 8 this year. An 81 year old woman! She was detained by the National Police, La Razón published. The octogenarian was not the only one arrested. Her 40-year-old son joined her.

Both, the aforementioned media reported, “are accused of torture for 15 hours and murder to an 18-year-old young man.”

On September 14, 2023, the National Police reported that the son was ‘in pre-trial detention’. The mother was released after appearing in court. They are accused of ‘murder, kidnapping and invasion of privacy’.

“I trust the truth of my grandson,” says Daniel Sancho’s grandmother and it turns out that after the murder the young chef contacted the cousin of the King of Spain: what did he ask him?

A contact from Algeria and two parallel investigations

The victim died on September 8. A day earlier, the young man was reported missing in Alicante by relatives in Algeria and they asked the Spanish police for support.

Without knowing it, according to Antena 3, the police started “two parallel investigations where the actors were the same people.”

“The Algerian family had received videos and photos of this young man in appalling conditions and as a means of pressure to obtain 30,000 euros (just over 32,000 dollars),” La Razón published.

In the footage, the victim appeared to be lying face up on the ground, his face covered with a mop, bleeding and badly bruised.

Police have been deployed to search for the suspected kidnapped person.

The intersection of two investigations

On Thursday afternoon, September 7, a committee was sent to a home in Alicante, “where a care team was caring for a man who was bleeding profusely in a house.”

Antena 3 described the young man “on the ground, prone, unconscious and seriously injured with cuts and visible bruises all over his body.”

The octogenarian and her son were interviewed and indicated that they had found him in that state and that they knew him. They also called him a thief.

The son spoke up and said that his mother and he were “on holiday in Alicante, live in another homeand that the victim had robbed them the day before along with five other persons,” La Razón reported.

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After making this claim, the young man is said to have agreed to return what he had supposedly taken but had not complied with when they went to the place that had summoned them.

He also said they found him with two other subjects. “Hours later,” he explained, “he and his mother went to the house and found him already in that condition.” Up to that point, the investigation had not yet ‘crossed over’.

Police stated, according to Cadena SER, that two acquaintances of the victim arrived at the police station “to report that they had seen photos of the possible kidnapping of the friend on a network profile.”

The word caused them to connect the two incidents. “When they arrived at the house, they found the octogenarian cleaning the blood from the floor of the house with a mop,” the Spanish news site said.

That mop was the one in the photo they used to ask for the money “for the ransom,” La Razón noted.

The 81-year-old woman and her son “were cruel” to the young man

But how did this horrible thing come about? The police assume that “the victim and the detainee had been arguing for two days about a possible theft of their money and documentation from the first to the second day.”

The 40 year old man returned early on the 7th, they argued again and the young man was beaten.

What followed is terrifying: “For the next fifteen hours, the arrested man, presumably with the help of his mother, had to subject the victim to constant and unnecessary suffering, using such cruelty that he was left virtually lifeless.”

He entered the hospital virtually brain dead.

They made it public, Cadena SER continues, because the victim’s images reached the open profile of their social network. In the photos he looked “naked and in a terrible condition caused by torture (…)”.

When the situation got out of hand, they called the emergency services. It was too late for the 18-year-old. According to Cadena SER, the people involved, mother and son, are Algerian.

(JO)