Five people have been arrested in connection with violent burglary against a 67-year-old woman in her home in Armilla around the beginning of this month.

The thieves bound and gagged the victim, leaving her on her own bed after stealing 40,000 euros in cash and valuables, as well as her mobile phone and her house keys.

Amongst those arrested is a 16-year-old girl, who is believed to be the mastermind behind the burglary in the early hours of the 8th of May. The other arrested persons are three males between 28 and 52 years of age, all of whom have criminal records, and two females aged 30 and 41 years of age.

The Guardia Civil launched a police investigation code-named, Redbag, shortly after the incident, which uncovered that the violent burglary had been planned the night before in Fuente Vaqueros. Apparently the teenage girl told the others that a relative of hers living in Armilla kept lots of cash at home, which they could steal and share out amongst themselves.

The girl then got into a car with them and showed them where the victim lived then waited in the car whilst the three men entered the house, armed with a revolver.

The youngest man found the woman sleeping in her bedroom and bound & gagged her. The other two men searched the house and found the money, jewellery and other items that they took with them.

What happened afterwards was that the three men drove off leaving the girl behind. Seeing that she had been duped and left with no share of the booty, she decided to invent a story of how she had been kidnapped and even raped in order not to be suspected of having taken part in the scheme.

She sent a photo of herself, bound hands and feet with tie offs with both her T-shirt and jeans torn in several places and sent it to her boyfriend, so that he would send it on to her parents. The next morning she took a taxi to the main hospital in Granada (PTS) and made a statement claiming that she had been kidnapped and molested, but she couldn’t remember if she had been ‘raped or not.’ A medical examination showed that she had not.

The police, then, had two lines of investigation open; one for a violent burglary and the other for the kidnapping of a minor. However, they soon discovered that there was a connection between the two – the kidnap victim being a relative of the burglary victim. The girl’s account of her kidnapping under questioning unravelled, revealing that it was a ploy to avoid being connected with the burglary.

She was arrested for simulating a crime on the 10th of May and then released pending trial, but not before obtaining the names of the others involved.

On the 20th of Mayo the Guardia Civil tracked two of the men to a gasolinera in Pulianas. Searching their vehicle they found the .38 calibre revolver in the glove compartment. One of them was a known violent criminal from La Zubia with an arrested warrant already out on him.

The next day on the 21st, the Guardia Civil from Güéjar Sierra found the dwelling where the thieves were hiding, as they knew that not only the Guardia Civil were after them, but also the burglary victim’s family seeking vengeance. In the dwelling the police recovered some of the jewellery and a shotgun with cartridges, which had been stolen in Granada.

Finally, on the 22nd, the last of the three men turned himself in at the Guardia Civil post.

As mentioned above, the family of the victim had done some investigating themselves and discovered that the victim’s granddaughter had been in on it as well as finding out the identity of the men who had broken into the house of the sleeping victim.

They tracked down the girlfriend of one of the thieves in Fuente Vaqueros. They burst into her home and turned it upside down in search of the cash and jewels. They also interrogated her but gleaning neither the stolen goods nor any information from the woman, they pushed her into their car with the intention of her showing them where her boyfriend was hiding out in La Zubia.

Fortunately for the thieves, the Guardia Civil found them first; they had heard of the incident in the girlfriends house and sent out patrols around Metropolitan Granada and stopped the car on the outskirts of La Zubia.

Editorial comment: there’s never a dull moment in Sunny Granada!

(News: Metropolitan Granada, Andalucia)