La Rocío, the 44-year-old woman allegedly murdered at the hands of her partner on Monday morning in a home in Alfàs del Pi (Marina Baixa), had gone to a Civil Guard barracks on the eve of the crime to report that he was the victim of abuse, but at the last moment he refused. The representative of the Government in the Valencian Community, Pilar Bernabé, explained that neighbors of the victim and local police officers from Alfaz accompanied this woman to the barracks so that she could file a complaint “because she did not want to” and added that “being at the place of the Civil Guard decided that he did not want to report”.
Despite this, the protocol and process of monitoring Rocío was activated by the Civil Guard, who for the next few hours were in “permanent communication” with the victim until they stopped locating her. The latter caused her to start looking for her, until, subsequently, she was found lifeless at the home of Alfàs del Pi. His partner and alleged murderer was arrested yesterday morning, around 0.30 am, in a brothel in the Alicante municipality of Coix, as sources in the case told Efe.
The arrested, 52 years old, is of Spanish nationality, just like the murdered Rocío, according to the same sources.
The crime was committed in the early hours of Monday in a house in the urban center of Alfàs, on Carrer Figuera, but it became public on Tuesday around 2 p.m., when the Civil Guard found the body of the woman, who had two children from a previous relationship. Since then, a search device was activated for his romantic partner – who also has two children with a different woman and who had a history of abusing the latter – which concluded successfully yesterday morning.
From the outset, the researchers’ main hypothesis was that it was a sexist crime committed in the small town of Alfàs del Pi, which is appalled.
The Government representative indicated that both Rocío and the alleged murderer had complaints to the Viogén system. In her case, from the year 2023, when she lived with her previous partner and father of her two children in Benidorm; and regarding the alleged murderer of another previous couple. The detainee is in the dungeons of the Civil Guard and it is not yet known what day he will be at the disposal of the judge leading the investigation.
The Alfàs del Pi Town Council has decreed three days of official mourning for the alleged murder and has shown the town’s “strongest condemnation” of this “brutal aggression”.
The mayor of the town, Vicente Arques, conveyed his condolences to the family and people close to the victim, and called for the “seamless unity of the whole society against this scourge”. “We want to express the most resounding condemnation of the alleged sexist murder of our neighbor. We are terribly dismayed by this brutal aggression”, he said, as collected by the Consistory in a statement.
