Yousef Mohamed Lehrech, alias the Pastilla, was arrested on Thursday after being searched and captured for 33 days after escaping from Alcalá Meco prison. The German authorities caught him more than 2,000 kilometers from the Madrid prison, at a train station in Leipzig, in eastern Germany, after a laborious investigation in which police officers from several countries have participated. The prisoner – who has two convictions for murder – avoided leaving any clues as to his escape, but finally a closed-circuit television camera (almost) betrayed him, although several checks had to be done beforehand.
The National Police used the European network of serious and urgent fugitives. Agents from the fight against organized crime have been involved in case the fugitive could be in national territory. The first analyzes carried out by the investigators with inquiries into the escape and the route followed by the fugitive led the agents to Montpellier. The Gallic police carried out checks on his stay in the city in the south of France.
However, the investigation soon led to Germany, until he was caught at the home of a family in Cologne that was giving him shelter. The police stalked his steps until “a person similar to the fugitive” was visualized by a closed-circuit television camera in the vicinity of the home of the allegedly accomplice family. Even so, there were insufficient certainties of his identity. It was then that the group of physiognomists from the scientific police came into play to check if that face that had been captured by the camera was that of l . positive check
For this reason, the German counterparts were requested to exercise extreme caution in the face of possible movements, in case they realized that the Police had practically hunted him down. Indeed, Pastilla was running away from his home in Colonia. He was arrested near Leipzig station, more than 400 kilometers from the previous city. When he was detected, as reported by the Police, he could not be identified. He refused and had no documentation. The officers had to do a fingerprint confrontation to verify that it was him.
The story of the most famous escape in recent years began on December 23. The day before Christmas Eve, when relatives and friends of the prisoners of Alcalá Meco flood the prison to have meetings with their relatives on the occasion of Christmas. El Pastilla, aged 20, was serving time for the murder of one of the heads of organized mafias in Ceuta and for another man he mistook for a member of a rival gang. He had arrived at Alcalá de Henares prison a few weeks ago from Algeciras, where he had had all kinds of conflicts with another group of inmates. It was listed in the highest monitoring level.
That Christmas afternoon he took advantage of the continuous movement of visitors to evade security checks. He mingled with family members without prison officials detecting the escape. There was no violence or intimidation. A clean escape that was not detected until a few hours later, when the protocols were activated, alerting the forces and security bodies of the escape that would mark the culebrot of last Christmas: the multiple murderer was free. It was then that the police investigation began which ended yesterday with his arrest.
