National Police agents at the Alicante Central District Police Station have arrested a 50-year-old man as the alleged perpetrator of nine careless robberies in the central area of ??the city. The individual has been arrested more than one hundred times in Spain, 70 of them for theft, and his activity focused on hotels and businesses frequented by tourists.
The agents of the Response Operational Group (GOR) of the Alicante Central Police Station were commissioned by Room 091 to a central hotel in the city, in whose cafeteria a bag had been stolen, as explained by the National Police in a statement. The detainee, of Moroccan nationality, was placed at the disposal of the Alicante Guard Court of Investigation.
A hotel worker had previously discovered the alleged perpetrator and had detained him until the arrival of the agents. The police intervention ended with the man being transferred to police stations.
The detainee lacked documentation and his full identification was necessary to be able to make the report in which the facts would be explained and thus inform the court.
In parallel to these efforts, the Judicial Police Operational Group of the Central District of Alicante set out to carry out verifications and comparisons with various complaints on which they were working. All of them were related to robberies that had occurred in hotels and similar establishments in the central area of ??the capital.
Upon viewing the images from the security cameras, the agents verified that the perpetrator of these events was a man with the same characteristics as the person who was being identified by the Citizen Security callsigns.
Thus, eight other events were confirmed in which the same person had apparently acted, stealing all types of personal effects from carelessness, acting mainly in public establishments, during busy hours, to avoid being discovered.
Among the items that he had allegedly stolen were bags, high-end mobile phones, sunglasses and eyeglasses, cash, documentation, sets of keys and other items that any citizen can carry with them. Many of his victims were tourists who were left without his documentation in a country that was not their own, making it difficult for them to return or even stay in Spain.
According to investigators, this person was “a professional criminal”, he dressed as a tourist, “which in a city like Alicante made him go completely unnoticed.” The National Police has highlighted the “naturalness with which he acted” of the individual, who entered the establishments “greeting friendly staff (whom he did not know) to convey confidence around him.”
Furthermore, apparently, he always acted in situations in which tourists were eating or shopping, a time when they were relaxed and he took the opportunity to carry out the thefts. He usually used some distraction object, called a ‘crutch’ in police jargon, to hide the maneuver that gave him access to someone else’s property.
The National Police has focused on “the great practice of this itinerant criminal who had previously acted in other territories of the country”, with more than 100 arrests, 70 of them theft.
