The title sounds bad enough when you’re talking about a cat, but what if it’s an 11-year-old boy? And that, in fact, was the case, as ‘cat’ was the code word for the child victim of a kidnapping in Barcelona.
This sad plot with a happy ending started in a Spanish jail where a Colombian father was doing time for drug offences. He made the mistake of becoming friends with a Spanish inmate who is doing time for murder. During their chats he unwittingly spoke about his life, his home and his family, explaining how his wife and three children needed to sort out their residency paperwork – this last piece of information nearly led to his son’s death.
The ‘friend’ allegedly convinced the Colombian to get his wife and one child to travel to Barcelona where he knew a bent copper (corrupt policeman), who could sort out their papers. The mother and child went to Barcelona and met a woman, whose flat they stayed the night at. The next day the woman was to drive them to a meeting with the policeman, but instead, she allegedly drove them to a piece of wasteland where they were met by another car containing four men, armed and wearing masks. They took the young boy and told the mother that she had to pay five million euros if she ever wanted to see her son alive again.
The woman didn’t hesitate to go straight to the Catalan regional police, Los Mossos, who in a short time discovered that the brain behind the kidnapping was a prisoner at the Catalan prison who had met the victim’s father in a prison in Valencia months before.
Two days after the woman reported the kidnapping, the police located where the child was being held, which was in the same flat where the mother and child had stayed.
The video footage of the rescue was broadcast on national TV, where you can see the boy, who was obviously drugged, having the plastic cable ties cut from his wrists and legs, which were used to secure him to a bed. “How are you? Don’t worry; we’re the police and we’re taking you home.” The boy responded, “They told that I am kidnapped and I can’t say anything to anybody,” to which he policeman responded, “Don’t worry, we’ve already caught the baddies.”
It later transpired that they had threatened to cut his tongue out if he spoke, and sell him to a family of torturers if his family didn’t pay. Furthermore, when the police searched the flat they found written instructions on how to carry out this particular kidnapping, presumably from the ‘brain’ in the Catalan prison. In these instructions was the chilling order to kill the boy and dismember the corpse if they suspected that the ‘operation’ had been discovered. The instructions referred to the boy as el gato, the mother as la gata and the father as the peluche (teddy bear).
(News: Valencia, Spain)