Yousef Mohamed Lehrech, alias ‘El Pastilla’, was transferred to Spain this Wednesday after he was arrested on January 25 after escaping from the Alcalá-Meco prison in Madrid. The National Police has released images of ‘El Pastilla’ guarded by agents from the SIRENE office of the Police.
‘El Pastilla’, a 20-year-old young man, before escaping was in provisional prison in the Alcalá-Meco penitentiary center for the alleged murder of two people in April 2023. The first victim was Nayim K.A., alias ‘ Tayena’, head of one of the organized crime factions in Ceuta. The second was a 26-year-old man whom the gang mistook for a member of a rival group.
However, on December 23, the detainee escaped from prison. That Saturday afternoon, on Christmas Eve, “El Pastilla” took advantage of communications with relatives and immediately escaped, hiding among the crowd of people and skipping security checks.
Sources from Penitentiary Institutions explained that that same afternoon they detected the absence of this inmate. Consequently, they activated the established protocols to communicate what happened to the Security Forces and Corps and the Court handling the prisoner’s case.
However, on January 11, the General Secretariat of Penitentiary Institutions, dependent on the Ministry of the Interior, opened a file against prison officials for their alleged involvement in the chain of errors that led to the prisoner’s escape.
This opening of a file affects three officials from the Madrid prison. First, to the person who led ‘El Pastilla’ to the communications room (the booth). Next, the person in charge of taking the relatives outside the prison once they saw his children, among whom the young fugitive camouflaged himself. And finally, to the official at the main gate, who did not warn that a person had not given her their ID before leaving the facilities.
Finally, the fugitive was located on January 25 at a train station in the German town of Leipzig. The arrest was carried out in an investigation carried out by the Fugitive Location Section, through the ENFAST Network.
However, ‘El Pastilla’ already had a police record prior to the crimes. The National Police had already detained the young man at the end of May 2023 in the port of Algeciras and he was provisionally imprisoned in the prison of this Cadiz city. He was classified as level five in the File of Special Monitoring Inmates (FIES) of Penitentiary Institutions.
Due to his conflict with a group of inmates from that prison, the arrested man was transferred to Alcalá-Meco at the beginning of last December before he fled.
