Cover Up Flop
A 32-year-old man has been arrested for making a false report to the police, claiming that he had been robbed; he did this to cover up having spent 3,000 euros in a brothel.
On the 22nd of February, R.P.E reported that his wallet had been lost or stolen three days previously. In it, he claimed, was his ID card and credit card. He had noticed his wallet ‘missing’ after a stroll through the old part of Granada. Shortly after this initial visit to the police station, he returned to report that somebody had fraudulently used his missing credit card to the tune of 3,000 euros.
The police carried out a bit of investigation and came up with the fact that R.P.E had been in a house of ill-repute, and had hired the VIP suite and the services of two ladies of liberal ideas from five in the morning to five the next afternoon on the 19th of February – i.e., a couple of days before reporting his wallet ‘lost or stolen.’ Nice try…
Another False Claim
An underage teenage girl stands accused of falsely claiming that a male friend had raped her. According to the Public Prosecutor, she did this knowing full well that this ‘crime’ had only taken place in her imagination. What had started off with her father accompanying her to the police station to report the alleged sexual aggression, effectively ended up with her father witnessing her stand before the judge herself, as the accused.
The girl, who has a record of running away from home, had decided to abscond again and it was on this last ‘outing’ that she claimed a male friend had forced her to have sex with him. However, according to the Minors Judicial Department, it appears that she made this claim in revenge, because the lad had, in reality, tried to persuade her to buck up her ideas and go home; i.e., gave her some good advice and home truths and was repaid for it with the allegations.
The Public Prosecutor for Minors is recommending a 1-year probation period, should she be found guilty.
False Butano Inspector.
Yet again we hear of a case of a bogus butane-installation inspector ripping off unsuspecting homeowners – and you don’t have to be a foreigner with little command of Spanish to fall for this one. In this instance, not only did he charge his victims 100 euros for his services, but he also made off with most of their valuables from drawers and a dressing table.  The target was, as is often the case, an elderly couple.
“Excuse me, but can I use your toilet, please – I’m afraid I have an upset stomach.” This was the excuse that the conman used to gain access to the bedrooms.
The crook wore a uniform very similar to the authentic company and even sported one of their badges on his overalls. He claimed that he worked for a subcontracted company of Butano, whose task it was to carry out obligatory gas-installation inspections.
The lady of the house was surprised that the ‘guest in the toilet’ was taking so long, so she went to investigate and saw him coming out of one of the bedrooms. He explained that as the house was so well kept and pleasantly decorated, he had decided to have a peek. He congratulated the woman on her excellent taste. Mollified by the compliment, they waved fond farewell and were commenting on the well-turned-out young gentleman and his refreshing manners, when they discovered that they had been robbed.
What to do? Well, if you are in the slightest doubt, we would recommend that you ask to see the person’s ID – not his work ID, which can be easily falsified, but his personal DNI, and make a note of his full name and DNI number. If he is a bona-fide inspector, he should have no objection at your show of caution, but if he’s not, he will either refuse or desist. Furthermore, if you do have that information and later find out that you have been ripped off, the Guardia Civil will be thrilled to receive it.
Ensañamiento
Damned tricky word to translate: ensañamiento, but in a juridical sense it would be something like ‘with intent to make the victim suffer.’ So, for example, if somebody were to cause a personal physical harm, or even death, if the aggressor’s intention was for the experience to be as unpleasant as possible, then ensañamiento is added to the charge and the court sentence would be accordingly stiffened.
Having explained that, it is difficult, perhaps, to see how the regional supreme courts, El Tribunal Supremo de Justicia de Andalucía, could consider that an aggressor that killed his victim using no less than 20 stab thrusts could not have had ensañamiento in mind, but that is precisely the case concerning the Moroccan female student, Lamyae Denna.
It was shown during a trial by jury that the 23-year-old Moroccan lass was ventilated by a 54-year-old Spanish man, who was subsequently sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment. The relatively lenient sentence was awarded because the jury did not consider that Manuel R.S. had employed ensañamiento. The family of the woman appealed before the TSJA against the sentence, who decided to back the original court finding, basing its decision that ensañamiento ‘had not been proven.’
This is surprising, perhaps, because you would have thought that after the first half a dozen stab wounds it might have crossed his mind that it just wasn’t cricket, wouldn’t you? Surely the next 14 stab wounds – probably with a small rest in between – would have required a certain determination to inflict suffering?
Abandoned but not Forgotten
In the province of Granada alone, over 1,200 cars have been abandoned at garages because their owners simply don’t have the money to pay the repair bill. This has accumulated a combined 3m-euro loss for the garage owners.
You know how it works: you take it in with a problem and then find that the repair work costs more than the car is worth, so rather than trying to dispose of it the hard way, you simply sneak off and never answer the phone.
The majority of these 1,248 abandoned cars are between eight and ten years old and have had between 1,000 and 2,000’s euros worth of work done on them. They’re not completely abandoned; it’s just that the owners won’t go and collect them until they can pay the bill, which means the average time that they are left hanging around, clogging up repair shops is between three and four months, although there have been cases of up to four years.
“The non-payment of repair bills and abandonment of vehicles is an heavy burden that the repair shops have to bear until the legal time limit expires and they can sell them – barely covering the money spent by them, or take them directly to the scrap yard,” explained the provincial Chairman of the Federación Andaluza de Talleres (FATA), Sebastian Ruiz.
Censorship?
A university professor from the UGR (Universidad de Granada) has denounced what he claims to be deliberate censorship on the TV. Professor Miguel Ángel Losada wrote the script for a programme on urban development in which two minutes dealt with urban development corruption on the coast. He claims that TVE and the Ministry of the Environment are insisting on suppressing those two minutes, but he has dug his heels in and won’t let the programme be aired in a mutilated state. Talk about David and Goliath!
The Ministry want those 120 seconds edited out because it claims that the content is not correct – yeah, right! The offending part basically claims that the coast is in such a dreadful state, in an urban-development sense, because of corruption. “All or nothing!” demanded the professor, and then the excreta hit the fan.
Ex-Minister, Cristina Narbona, commissioned the programme in 2006 with a budget of 1,292,874 euros, envisaged to cover the ‘destruction of the coastline.’ Having spent all that money and got what she asked for, the Ministry can’t really shelve the programme without being hammered by the opposition, yet the Prof. is not going give in.
“Unfortunately, corruption is part of our history. This is just as much a case of censorship as the photos in Valencia,” he said, referring to the case where the PP wanted all photos of their MP’s accused of corruption withdrawn from a photo exhibition in Valencia, so as to keep them out of the public eye until the heat died down. The organiser of the exhibition, which covered all aspects of society in Valencia, refused to remove them and closed the exhibition instead. This time, it is the ruling socialist party in Madrid.
From the State TV network (TVE) and the Ministry’s point of view, the programme, entitled, Las Riberas del Mar Oceano, has 13 chapters lasting 45 minutes each, of which they only asked for six small corrections for ‘purely technical reasons.’ They claim that the lamentable state of the coast is because of bad planning and over development, regardless of whether corruption is a reality on the coast.
Not surprisingly, Greenpeace and Ecologistas en Acción are demanding the airing of the complete, unadulterated version of the documentary.
Parking Handicap
A female driver in the city of Granada with a medical disability has been fined four times for parking… in a reserved parking space for the disabled. Consequently, the lady concerned, Elena Molina, is not chuffed (happy).
“Somebody in the Policía Local can’t get it right, or the municipal regulations are out of synch with the by-laws of the Regional Government,” she speculated.
Elena has 36% disability and has had it since she was 11-months old, so it is not as if the Local Police haven’t had time to assimilate the fact. Nevertheless, she’s received four fines – the first two she paid, but after that, she dug her heels in and has taken her plight to the newspapers. On one of the occasions, she returned to where she had parked her car to find a yellow sticker on the curb next to where it had been parked – it had been towed away.
The reason that she paid the first two was because she was appealing against the fines at the time, and the system is pay now and be reimbursed later, if you prove your case. The Local Police rejected the appeal, even though she turned up with all her disability-allowance papers, as well as the disability sticker that she always sports in her car windscreen, which was issued by the Junta de Andalucía.
The Local Police have responded in each case that the police had not seen the disabled sticker or that it had appeared ‘false’ to them. Sherlock Holmes is alive and well, working for the Local Police of Granada, it seems…
Sleeping Policemen
For the non-British readers, a ‘sleeping policeman’ is what is also known as a ‘speed bump,’ that’s to say, an elevated road surface designed to make motorists slow down in order to pass over them. The Spanish equivalent, interestingly enough, is lomo de asno (donkey’s back). What ever you want to call them, they are, without doubt, a bloody nuisance and disastrous for a car’s shock absorbers. Well, that could soon be a thing of the past… in the city of Granada, at least.
The City Hall is studying a system that uses liquid-filled cushions, the contents of which displace, allowing the wheels of a vehicle to pass over, if crossed at a low speed. If you go too fast, the liquid simply doesn’t have the chance to ‘get out of the way,’ and the jolt is the same if you pass over a conventional speed bump at that speed.
Another system that is being considered is an imbedded hump that only elevates if a detector is activated. The system works pretty much like the traffic lights that turn to red if you approach faster than 50kph. Of the two, the liquid bumps are more attractive because they are cheaper and less complicated.
The great thing about the liquid-filled bumps is that when you approach them at low speed the minimised obstacle only lifts the wheels about one centimetre, meaning that drivers who drive sensibly are not ‘penalised’ – or better said, the suspension system of the car is not.
And that is the problem with conventional speed bumps; it doesn’t matter how slow you go, it is still a trial for your shock absorbers. Furthermore, town halls go crazy with their placing of the bumps, scattering the roads with them. A good example is the new roundabout at Maro, where not only are there speed bumps before the roundabout, there are also ones installed after the exit, with nothing but open road beyond.
Now, the reason behind this ‘kindness’ is thanks to a new, nationwide law that regulates the specifications of speed bumps – town halls that do not comply can be fined. Up until now, every municipality used their own specifications, even going so far to have different heights and materials used within their own boundaries. Some of them are veritable assault courses, measuring 40 cm in height, whereas the new law stipulates a maximum height of 10 cm.
Furthermore, the ramps leading up onto the obstacles and down from it are regulated in length according to the speed limit: 1m = 30kph, 1.5m = 40kph and 2.5m = 50kph.
Hired Thugs
A man has been arrested for allegedly hiring a pair of thugs to beat up his wife. The husband in question admitted to the police that he hired them to make it look like a mugging.
The 32-year-old woman had been waylaid as she approached the door to the block of flats where she lives. The two men beat her savagely and then, following instructions to make it look like a robbery ran off with her bag. And that is how the victim reported it to the police: robbery with violence.
However, the police were not happy with the idea because the level of aggression for such a small amount of ‘loot’ didn’t fit. The suspicion led to a thorough investigation and arrest of the 42-year-old husband two weeks later.
Murder and Suicide
A mother suffocated her young daughter and then killed her aged mother before committing suicide herself.  This took place in Sorbas, Almería and caused a great deal of social commotion in the area, as can be imagined.
The 36-year-old Belgian woman, Marina G.G. struck her 67-year-old mother several times with an axe, before suffocating her 4-year-old daughter with a pillow and then hanging herself.
The ex-partner and father of the child, 40-year-old Enrique, had been waiting for her and his daughter to turn up at a fiesta. When they had failed to turn up at the appointed place and time and had not responded to his repeated phone calls, he went round to their home; a cortijo about seven kilometres from Sorbas. When he arrived it was to find a note pinned to the door explaining that the keys had been left with a neighbour. He went round to the neighbour’s house and they both went back to the cortijo. The father suffered a mental breakdown upon discovering the bodies and was taken to hospital for treatment.
Demolition Orders
Last month’s Seaside Gazette had a front page on a possible demolition order and in this month’s Almuñécar section we continues with the story, but are the chances of somebody having their illegal house demolished probable?
To answer this, let’s take a look on at the city of Granada and what’s happening there. The City Hall has, at the moment, 267 buildings that are facing legal action that could end in a demolition order and 74 have already been reduced to rubble, with another 60 awaiting the arrival of municipal heavy demolition machinery within the next couple of months. So, yes, it does happen.
At the beginning of March, for example, a house in Calle Puente de Cartuja was knocked down because it had been built without a licence and part of the plot had ‘invaded public property.’
However, within this startling number of houses facing demolition, there are ruinous houses in the old quarter of the city that have become a danger to public safety, so not all of the houses awaiting the bulldozers have been built illegally.