The crime presented all the ingredients of a settling of accounts between criminal gangs, carried out with extreme violence. Last Tuesday night, three men of Colombian nationality were found dead inside a vehicle in the natural area of ??El Saler, south of Valencia. The set contained all the ingredients of the genre: shot to death (they were riddled), in a “strange position” and abandoned inside their car in the Gola de Puchol, which is a humid area of ??the El Saler forest. The suspicion was logical, it was the work of professionals, of hitmen.
According to El Universal, a newspaper from Cartagena de Indias, Roberto Carlos Vega Daza would be one of the three men shot dead yesterday in Valencia. “Roberto Carlos is known for belonging to the Vega Daza clan, a victim of several attacks. The most recent one left his father and brothers dead, and was perpetrated in Villa Campestre, in Barranquilla, on June 29, 2023. That time, in the place, Rafael Vega Cuello (father), Ronald Iván Vega Daza, Ray Vega Daza (sons) died after receiving 33 bullets; Roberto Carlos was injured” described the aforementioned newspaper.
Let’s take a jump back. Last September, the Civil Guard arrested four people, three men and a woman, Colombian hitmen who tried to murder a businessman in the Valencian town of Puçol in December 2022. Two of the detainees shot with a firearm. fire from a motorcycle, a method started decades ago by Colombian hitmen gangs. They fired a first shot that missed the target’s head by a few centimeters and when they were about to fire a second shot, the businessman accelerated quickly and managed to flee with his vehicle. A third member of this gang of hitmen was being investigated for providing coverage from a vehicle. The woman is suspected of having hidden the weapon.
This assassination attempt had a price: 30,000 euros, according to the Civil Guard. A first payment of 15,000 euros had been agreed. They had to receive the rest of the agreed money once the order was completed; that is, the execution. The suspects planned to kill the businessman that summer, but ran into problems. One of those investigated had recently undergone surgery and could not participate, so the rest of the members looked for a substitute hitman who was going to travel from Colombia. It is unknown who commissioned the hitmen to do the job. Puçol is north of Valencia, a few kilometers; El Saler is south of Valencia, a few kilometers away.
Let’s take one more leap. On February 13, Russian pilot Maxim Kuzminov was found shot dead in the Russian pilot Vila Joiosa, Alicante. He did not want to go to war, and he ended up flying his Mi-8 helicopter to Ukraine in a joint operation with that country’s intelligence service. His friends say that Maxim was “afraid of dying in the war” and wanted to leave the Army even before the start of the war in Ukraine, but “they wouldn’t let him.” Furthermore, the pilot was terrified of being captured in Ukraine.
The head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Narishkin, said the pilot was a “traitor.” “This traitor and criminal became a moral corpse the moment he planned his dirty and terrible crime,” Narishkin said, according to the official Russian news agency RIA Novosti. Narishkin added: “In Russia it is often said: either one speaks well about the dead or one does not speak at all.” Did Russia send hitmen to Alicante to end Kuzminov’s life, taking advantage of the large Russian community residing in this province?
The Valencian police remain silent, as does the Civil Guard. These are crimes by organized gangs, in the case of the Colombians, and an alleged crime orchestrated by a world power; matter investigated by the specialized bodies of the Ministry of the Interior. But no one is aware that both are atypical events of extreme seriousness that, in addition, generate logical social alarm. Are there hitmen in the Valencian Community?
Sources from the Government Delegation recall that the presence of murder professionals has been detected for years. Recently, for example, hitmen tried to murder Alejo Vidal-Quadras in broad daylight in Madrid. In 2022, there were around 40 murders in Spain, allegedly carried out by hitmen. These operate especially in large capitals such as Madrid and Barcelona, ??and for some time they have had an evident presence in the south of Spain, on the Malaga coast.
In 1990, Jordi Bordás and Eduardo Martín de Pozuelo, journalists from La Vanguardia, published a book titled La Cosa Nuestro in which they described the geographies in which Italian mafia bosses took refuge in Spain. Alicante was one of his favorite areas. In those times, hitmen from these organizations perpetrated more than one crime in the Valencian Community. Now, decades later, the hitmen, with other profiles but with similar methods, make an appearance again.
