Two hits at luxury hotels in Madrid in the same afternoon and a hasty flight by plane… even with the safe on top. National Police agents have arrested a man, a 53-year-old Mauritanian with a history of similar events, at the Adolfo Suárez-Madrid-Barajas airport when he tried to escape, presumably to the Canary Islands, after robbing rooms of two establishments on Gran Vía, in the downtown district of the capital, expensive clothes, luxury goods, computers and jewelery worth 172,000 to a group of young Canadians and a Swiss tourist.
According to a police spokesman, this film theft began at half past eight on Wednesday night, May 17, and was resolved just two and a half hours later with the in extremis arrest of the alleged thief when he was almost one foot out of Madrid. . At that time, a group of 10 Canadian tourists between the ages of 33 and 20 returned to the luxury apartment hotel where they were staying on Gran Vía to find the door burst and the room in a mess. The friends, who had arrived in the capital from Ibiza, missed many of their belongings and the safe in which they had put the most valuable ones, such as a Rolex, cash and their passports. The robbery, they denounced, had occurred between half past eight and half past nine at night.
The police hastily set up a device, which the first thing it did was see the security cameras of the apartment hotel. And there it was: the images showed how a suspect left the room around the time of the robbery “loaded with three giant suitcases.” The hotel workers remember him and say that he even “went to ask one of them for help to watch over a suitcase while he took out the others.” The man took a taxi and left in a hurry, so the police set up a device throughout Madrid to locate it, with special attention to the stations and the airport. The electronic devices that had been stolen betrayed his position to the agents: he was going to Barajas, specifically, to the T-4. The agents from the district police station alerted those from the airport, and the latter managed to locate the alleged perpetrator at the airport bus station, where he was arrested around eleven at night.
The agents asked for the documentation and verified that it was a man from Mauritania who has a “priority for robbery with force and other crimes in the Canary Islands”, for which they suspect that he was heading back to the archipelago. The suspect “managed to get away from the agents and tried to escape through one of the station doors,” but his escape attempt barely lasted 100 meters.
List of stolen objects found in the luggage of the detainee in Barajas on the 17th. NATIONAL POLICE
Once detained, the agents opened the suitcases, which contained all the material he had stolen in the robbery, as well as other objects that the Canadians did not recognize as theirs. Among what was his was a Louis Vuitton purse worth 27,500 euros, a Dior bag for 10,000, a Rolex for 20,000, branded clothing and glasses, electronic devices and other objects worth about 170,000. Part of this loot was inside the safe, which the thief could not or did not want to open and took it with him in one of the suitcases.
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Who did the rest belong to? The agents found another robbery that fit, as it was the same modus operandi: on the afternoon of that same day, the 17th, a Swiss tourist had filed a complaint at the Retiro police station for a robbery in his hotel room, also located in the Gran Vía and very close to the previous one. The victim said that he had gone out to dinner and, when he came back, the door to his room was broken and there was no sign of his things. He was missing two laptops and other personal effects worth about 2,000 euros, which all appeared in the suitcases of the same thief. He was arrested as the alleged perpetrator of two crimes of robbery with force and brought to justice.
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