A broken couple, an alleged kidnapping, gunshots and angst… a lot of angst. This is the quick photo of the events that happened yesterday in a chalet in Alzira, where Bartolo, a retired policeman aged around 70, barricaded himself in the garage of this house in the middle of the morning after holding Raquel hostage, his ex-partner It was almost seven hours of great tension and uncertainty, until at 18.45 in the afternoon the worst of the endings was confirmed. The woman had been shot dead by her ex-husband.
Everything points, then, to a new sexist crime that is added to another murder, which was also known yesterday, of a woman whose corpse appeared in a flat in the town of Salamanca de Béjar. He was 36 years old and the partner of this second victim of sexism was arrested hours later when he threatened to throw himself onto a motorway from the top of a viaduct. He was the one who called the police to confess to the crime and announce that he was about to commit suicide.
The news of this crime in Béjar, which took place in the early hours of the morning, was heard early yesterday, a few hours before the news of the abduction of another woman in a villa broke out at eleven o’clock in the morning from Alzira. The protagonists: a retired policeman and his 58-year-old ex-partner, who four months ago decided to end that relationship. The couple was now in separation proceedings.
Raquel’s relatives couldn’t explain yesterday what could have happened to that man to get so far. “The breakup took place without any problems,” said a sister of the abducted woman next to the police cordon set up around the villa, in the Balcón de la Ribera area. There would also be no allegations of abuse.
All the alarms went off in Alzira after a neighbor alerted – after noon – that he had heard several shots coming from that villa. Then it was learned that at eleven in the morning the ex-partner of the retired policeman had entered that home.
The reason for the visit is not yet clear. While Raquel’s sister claimed that the woman went to the house – accompanied by one of her children from a previous relationship – to collect clothes and some utensils, other sources pointed out that the visit could be in response to some procedure to assess the housing In this second version, a real estate worker enters the scene, who would have been a witness, along with Raquel’s son, to the kidnapping.
Both were able to leave the house. It is not known if they escaped or if the alleged kidnapper let them go. And then they would have explained that the retired policeman was armed and that he took his ex-wife to the garage of the villa, where she barricaded herself.
The possible existence of a weapon inside the house, the alert of the witness who claimed to have heard the detonation of shots and the anxiety because it was not known what was happening inside caused a spectacular police deployment. Agents of the urban and the National Police cordoned off the area and the Special Operations Group of the National Police Force (GOES) was mobilized. A group of negotiators also moved to the site.
The hours passed without information and the anguish among Raquel’s relatives became unbearable. They were all clinging to a happy ending. A sister of the policeman’s ex-partner claimed late in the morning that she did not understand what could be going through Bartolo’s mind. And he reiterated that the separation of the couple flowed without further conflicts.
At three quarter past seven in the afternoon everything rushed. One of the family members gathered next to the police cordon that surrounded the villa received a call on the phone. He heard the worst news. “She’s dead!” several people in that group exclaimed between sobs. “The son of a bitch has done it”, shouted another woman.
And the “friendly” version that Raquel’s relatives had given hours earlier about her relationship with Bartolo made a one hundred and eighty degree turn. “We didn’t say anything before because we trusted that he wouldn’t do what he did”, confessed one of those people close to the deceased. “But the truth is that she was afraid of him, she left because she was fed up with the psychological abuse and we had all told her not to go to that house.”
The GOES agent who entered the villa late in the afternoon found the two corpses. Raquel’s had half a dozen shots; Bartolo’s, a single shot. Everything seems very clear. The retired agent committed suicide after murdering his ex-partner. The autopsy of the corpses will reveal the time – it could have been already in the morning – of this new sexist crime.
