Nine houses in Garrucha and Mojacar have been burgled, with the intruders amassing a haul worth thousands of euros in cash and home entertainment unit

Nine houses in Garrucha and Mojacar have been burgled, with the intruders amassing a haul worth thousands of euros in cash and home entertainment units.Five youths, aged between 14 and 16, who have been taken in for questioning, are thought to have stolen around 6,000 euros’ worth of audiovisual equipment, including home cinema equipment, LCD-screen televisions, Playstation 3 consoles and other multimedia items, which they sold on to a 53-year-old man, known as ‘Jeronimo’, who has also been arrested.Initial enquiries have suggested that he made the teenagers steal to order, so that he could sell the goods on to third parties. The teen gang took advantage of holiday homes being empty over the winter months in order to break in undisturbed. Police were able to round up the ‘Fagin-style’ gang after two of the minors were identified as the culprits in a burglary at a home in Mojacar.Investigating officers say that their modus operandi was very similar to that of other burglaries in the area.The teenagers are currently being held in a youth detention centre but, as they are under 18, if the case comes to court, any sentence they receive will be far more lenient than that which would normally be imposed on adults.

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Stolen car gang thought to be behind the theft and alteration of top-of-the-range vehicles for re-sale has been broken up in Estepona.

Stolen car gang thought to be behind the theft and alteration of top-of-the-range vehicles for re-sale has been broken up in Estepona.They are said to have stolen the cars from dealers and garages and modified their chassis numbers, registration plates and other elements that could lead to their identification.These were then sold on in North African countries, having been shipped out from the port of Algeciras.The suspects, of Moroccan and Bulgarian nationality, often stole cars to order.One of their favoured methods was to go to a motor dealer and pretend they wanted to buy a car, so that they could see where the sales staff fetched the keys from. Other members of the group would then distract the salesperson whilst the car was stolen. The stolen cars were then taken to a villa in Estepona, where they were doctored for resale. The most recent arrests follow the detention of 12 other suspects in November 2008, thought to have been part of the same gang.Six people were taken into custody in Ciudad Rodrigo (Salamanca province) and another six in La Vila Joiosa and Teulada-Moraira (Alicante province).Also this week, 15 Spanish nationals were arrested in connection with a car-stealing operation on the Costa del Sol where luxury vehicles were stolen to order. Among those detained is a nightclub bouncer, who is said to have found customers for the gang. Documents and registration plates were forged and vehicles sold on around Spain and abroad. Vehicles valued at around one million euros, together with fake car ownership documents and the assets of eight companies, valued at 15 million euros, have been seized by police.The companies were found to have a further 500 cars, valued at around 10 million euros. Police enquiries are on-going and it is believed that, to date, more than 70 individual cases of theft have been traced back to the arrested parties.

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British holidaymakers are deserting Spain in their droves latest figures show.

British holidaymakers are deserting Spain in their droves latest figures show. Spanish tourism bosses said 148,000 fewer Britons visited last month compared to January 2008 - a drop of 20.5 per cent. It is the lowest number since records began 15 years ago.
A source at the Ministry for Industry, Tourism and Commerce said: "British visitors are traditionally by far our largest market. "The fall is due to the worsening economic situation in the UK and the fall in the value of the pound. Britons are looking for cheaper holidays outside the Euro-zone." The southern region which includes the Costa del Sol, registered a massive 26.8 per cent drop in the number of January visitors from the UK. The Canary Islands, popular with Brits seeking winter sun, saw 47,000 fewer tourists from the UK, a fall of 17.5 per cent. The fall-off in British visitors is potentially devastating for Spain as 11 per cent of the economy depends on tourism. About 13.8 million Britons visited Spain in 2007.

The pound's poor rate of exchange against the euro means that British holidaymakers are staying in the UK or are heading for newer destinations.

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Maras are much more dangerous than the Sicilian Mafia or the Camorra of Naples and they are coming to Spain

Violent gangs like the Latin Kings are almost inactive in Spain, but the country is becoming worried about the possible arrival of more dangerous gangs from Central America.The alert was given by Pedro Gallego, a Civil Guard sergeant who lived in Honduras for four years, during which time he analyzed what are known in the region as "maras," violent groups made up of young men and women ranging in age from 10 to 30 who only know how to survive via crime.The result of that study is contained in "La Mara al Desnudo" (The Mara Revealed), his new book He devoted part of the work to discussing two old Latino gangs that are well-known in Spain: the Latin Kings and the Ñetas, which exist above all in the regions of Catalonia, Valencia, Madrid and Murcia.Gallego said that both groups "are only in a dormant state" after the police substantially weakened them."They are resurging spurred by the loss of jobs and the crisis," he said, and the situation could become more complicated when the Central American gangs get into Spain, since they have tight relations with international organized crime."They (the maras) are much more dangerous than the Sicilian Mafia or the Camorra of Naples," he warned.He said that whether the gangs take root will depend on the entry of specific immigration flows from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, the bastions of gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha and Mara 18.
Family reunification also plays a part: "There are parents who want to bring their children to Spain and some of them could be members of one of these gangs."In addition, immigrants who are already in Spain could join the gangs. "It's possible that they'll feel attracted to these gangs after suffering xenophobia and losing their jobs," Gallego said.The author warns that the gangs have a very rapid rate of expansion and therefore it is necessary to fight them as early as possible, with both social measures and support for families."When it's detected that a boy has joined (a gang) you have to guarantee him protection and help him get out because abandoning the group means death, in contrast to what happens in other gangs," Gallego said."They say that there are only three places where you can be a gangmember: jail, the hospital and the cemetery," the expert added.The bait for attracting a young person to a gang of this kind is an attraction to the lifestyle and its typical elements, the power status and the easy access to sex and drugs.
The members of the gang do not all come from broken families and many of them are even educated and have a good economic situation.Gallego in his book analyzes the possibility that the gangs may transform themselves into cultural associations, as happened in Catalonia in 2006."It was a very useful tool to halt the commission of criminal acts, but then it has not been studied how it evolved and it's certain that many gangs use the excuse of being associated (with it) to clean up their image without really having done so," he said.

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Metrovaces Spain's biggest property firm said that it lost €738m last year, the biggest loss in its history, as the value of its holdings dived

Spain's biggest property firm said on Friday that it lost €738m last year, the biggest loss in its 90-year history, as the value of its holdings dived following the collapse of the real estate markets in Spain and the UK.The purchase of HSBC's tower in Canary Wharf - the biggest property deal in British history - has helped sink its Spanish buyer, Metrovacesa.Owners of the beleaguered building company, the Sanahuja family, will hand control of the company to its creditor banks, including Santander, swapping a 55% stake in exchange for cancelling €2.1bn (£1.9bn) of debt claims.The purchase of the 42-storey tower in London's Docklands is seen as the peak of the real estate boom for Spanish businesses, which saw a succession of firms launch themselves into an unprecedented debt-fuelled expansion spree. At the peak of the market, 800,000 homes a year were being built in Spain - more than France, Germany and Britain put together.The Madrid-based Metrovacesa bought the 100,000 sq metre tower in Canary Wharf for £1.09bn in May 2007, financed with a £810m loan that it could not pay off or refinance as credit markets tightened.

Like buyout firms such as Baugur, which have also found themselves in trouble, Metrovacesa counted on rising values and cheap debt. The recession, however, has seen valuations go into reverse, while the credit crunch has dried up funds.

The Spanish company sold the tower - 8 Canada Square - back to HSBC last December for £838m, leading to a £250m gain for HSBC and a loss for Metrovacesa.
The real estate collapse has exacerbated Spain's plunge into recession because the sector accounts, directly and indirectly, for about a quarter of the economy. Thousands of firms are going bust and even top football clubs such as Valencia can no longer afford to pay their star players.The former Valencia chairman and real estate entrepreneur Juan Soler raised the club's debt to more than €400m and started building a new stadium before it had sold the land occupied by its current Mestalla stadium, which it has still not managed to do because of plunging property prices and the credit crunch. Work on the new stadium has stalled while the club rushes to get a new financing deal with new lenders. A local savings bank, Bancaja, has already cut off credit.London's commercial property prices have fallen 27% since the credit crunch hit. The latest blow to Canary Wharf came late last month when Morgan Stanley quit its lease of six floors of office space 10 years earlier than planned.

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Immigrants harassed by police who are allegedly under pressure to fulfill arrest quotas.

memo leaked to Spanish media this week is purported to have instructed one particular police station in the Madrid area — not in Lavapies — to arrest 30 undocumented immigrants per week.

Spain's sizable immigrant population already faces soaring unemployment in a souring economy and a government pushing jobless foreigners to go home. Now they complain they are also being harassed by police who are allegedly under pressure to fulfill arrest quotas.In Lavapies, one of Madrid's most multicultural neighborhoods, home to many North Africans, Latin Americans, Asians and people of other origins, immigrants say they are constantly asked for their papers to prove they are legal residents.
"Here, you will never see an immigrant without papers. They are afraid to go out on the street," said Abdel Kader, a 72-year-old Moroccan retiree who has lived in Spain for 40 years.Santo Aybar, a 33-year-old Dominican, said police "go to the subway station at seven in the morning and ask everybody for their papers."They ask to see my papers all day: at breakfast, at lunch and at dinner," Aybar said. "They treat us like trash, as if we were criminals."The Interior Ministry has denied there is any quota system. But police unions complain they are under pressure to make arrests, and say officers pushed to meet their targets have ended up simply stopping foreign-looking people at random at train stations and bus stops."Our officers want to crack down on crime, not on people trying to go to work," police union spokesman Alfredo Perdiguero said Tuesday.Such a tactic aimed at immigrants would reflect how drastically things have changed in Spain, and how quickly. Just two years ago, Spain's economy was on fire, and it relied heavily on immigrant labor in the all-important construction sector. Now the real estate bubble has burst, the economy is in a recessionary spiral and the jobless rate nationwide is 13.9 percent — and almost 22 percent among immigrants.The government has even launched a program offering jobless legal immigrants lump-sum payments of their unemployment benefits if they agree to go home for a few years until the economy recovers.Immigrants complain they are being made scapegoats for hard times after helping Spain create much wealth and become one of Europe's economic success stories.Spain's known immigrant population is nearly 5 million, about 11 percent of the total population.
Being in the country without a residency permit is not a crime but rather a misdemeanor. Those caught are arrested and fingerprinted and can be held for 24 hours. Then they are given an expulsion order but in many cases this is not acted on, Perdiguero said.Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, addressing Parliament on Tuesday, denied there was any kind of written or verbal order mandating a quota for arrests of people without papers."The main goal of the ministry's expulsion policy is none other than to focus on those foreigners, legal or illegal, who commit crimes in Spain," the minister said.In Lavapies, not everyone is convinced of that assertion.
"There have been a lot of police around here in the past few months. But when the press reports what is happening, they leave us alone for a few days," said Ahmed Alimi, a 48-year-old Moroccan who has lived in Lavapies for 20 years.
Raul Jimenez, a spokesman for Ruminahui, an association for Ecuadorean immigrants, added: "It is clear that there has been a toughening of how immigrants are treated, because there is no other way to understand this."

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Users of pre-paid cards will find their service suspended in November if they have not identified themselves

new advertising campaign ‘Identifícate’ is to be launched by the Spanish government Interior Ministry at the end of this month with the objective of getting the 20 million mobile phone users with prepaid cards to register before a deadline date of November 7.It’s part of legislation passed in October 2007 under which unidentified mobile phone users will be cut off, as operators will be legally obliged to deactivate the cards which remain unidentified. The legislation was passed as a consequence of the terrorist attacks on the trains in Madrid on March 11 2004, when such pre-paid phones were used to activate the bombs. It’s estimated that currently only a quarter of the current 20 million such clients are identified in Spain. Some phone operators are trying to speed up the process by sending SMS messages to their users, and there is concern that some of the new so-called ‘virtual’ operators have no sales points where clients can register in many parts of the country.

To register your pre-paid card mobile you are asked to go to a sales point of your phone operator, taking along a DNI or foreigners residency paper, while companies will have to show their fiscal identification card.

The cost of the entire operation, estimated at between 30 and 50 million € has to be met by the phone operators.

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Search for the body of Marta del Castillo

Search for the body of Marta del Castillo, the 17 year old from Sevilla who went missing three weeks ago, and whose friend, 20 year old Miguel Carcaño D. has now confessed to her killing, has been extended downstream in the Guadalquivir River where Miguel said he threw the body, helped by his friend Samuel B.P.Police say the search has been extended as far as Sanlúcar de Barrameda 80kms away, and that it is being complicated by the 17 metre depth of the river and the fact that is tidal and there is a lot of mud. It could take days to find her body.Two helicopters are taking part in the search which will continue at first light on Monday.On Sunday hundreds of bikers collected in Sevilla to support Marta del Castillo’s family and calling for justice in the case.The two accused are to appear in court in Sevilla on Monday, with the main accused, Miguel Carcaño, possibly appearing in the Domestic Violence Court.

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Cyril Jacquet shot his mother three times using his father's automatic pistol after she entered the family home.

Cyril Jacquet, 29, and his girlfriend were among the contestants on a new show to be aired on the Antena 3 channel on Sunday night. But the pair were pulled from the programme after rumours surfaced on the internet that he had murdered his parents when he was 15 years old.In 1994, Jacquet shot his mother three times using his father's automatic pistol after she entered the family home. A few hours later, Jacquet used the remaining seven bullets for his father.He was pictured smiling at their funeral and eventually confessed to the double killing claiming they had "scolded him" and "sometimes" hit him. After serving less than three years in a youth detention centre he was released with no criminal record under Spanish law because he was a minor at the time.
Organisers of the show La Vuelta al Mundo (Around the World) which follows young couples as they race around the globe competing with each other for a 200,000 euros (£180,000) prize, claim they had no knowledge of his past.But fans of the show did their own research and discovered the crime, which was well publicised at the time.
Jacquet and his girlfriend Paola Alberdi, 24, were flown home from Venice before the first show was aired."The programme did not know," a presenter told viewers on the show's debut on Sunday night. "After we checked the facts of the case we brought them back to Spain to protect them from media attention."Jacquet, now a flight attendant, was in the studio and blamed the media and "undesirable" people for preventing him from participating in the reality show."They don't let you leave the past behind," he complained. "I don't want to keep giving them the excuse to lynch me.""But I will always hold my head up high," he said. "People change."

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Félix Martínez Touriño, has been shot dead in the street.

36 year old director of the Centro de Convenciones in Barcelona, Félix Martínez Touriño, has been shot dead in the street. His attacker shot him in the head in the San Gervasi area of the city yesterday and then made his escape on foot. Witnesses said the attacker was wearing a hat and scarf. Police are still to make an arrest and Los Mossos d’Esquadra say they are keeping all possibilities open in their investigations as to the motive for the killing.

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Nationalisation of tens of thousands of seaside residences in an attempt to protect the coastline from pollution

Environment Ministry is backtracking on plans to nationalize tens of thousands of seaside residences in an attempt to protect the coastline from pollution, the daily El Pais reported Monday. The Environment Ministry had intended to step up the application of a 1988 law prohibiting the construction of housing near the water line. The owners of such houses, many of whom are British and German nationals, would have been granted the right to use them for up to 60 years without being allowed to sell them. Protests from house owners and the British and German embassies have prompted the government to soften the plans, El Pais said.
The owners of seaside residences are expected to be given permission to sell them, which will make it more difficult to nationalize them, according to the daily.
Environmentalists have long been concerned about the impact of urbanization on Spain's coastline

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Iberia merger between the airline and British Airways was close.

chairman of Spain's Caja Madrid, the biggest shareholder in Iberia with 23%, said an agreement on a merger between the airline and British Airways was close.
"I believe the operation is close, that's my impression," Miguel Blesa told journalists as he presented the un- listed bank's 2008 results yesterday.Blesa is also deputy chairman of Iberia.When asked what was blocking a merger agreement, Blesa said the share split, corporate governance questions and the location of the combined group's headquarters all needed to be resolved."The perception now I think is that the share exchange will not be 60-40," he said of the likely stakes to be held by BA and Iberia. "Iberia is now worth more. It will be closer to 55-45."
British Airways' chief executive Willie Walsh is expected in Madrid today for talks with Iberia chairman Fernando Conte and other Oneworld alliance bosses.
"The talks are ongoing, no timescales have been set," a BA spokeswoman said.
When the two announced last July they were discussing a merger, British Airways expected to secure around 65% of the combined group, but since then its shares have plunged, worsened by a profit warning in January.Together with the pound's recent slide against the euro, Iberia's market capitalisation is now higher than BA's.
Iberia shares jumped 3.3% to 1.87 after the announcement. BA finished 4p down at 116p, partly because of massive travel disruption at Heathrow, its London hub.
BA cancelled all short-haul flights and long-haul journeys before 5pm because of heavy snow.A spokesman said the weather also disrupted other airlines, and the disruption was likely to continue today.

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Spanish police arrested 13 people Tuesday on suspicion of links to organized crime and terrorism groups.

Spanish police arrested 13 people Tuesday on suspicion of links to organized crime and terrorism groups.A police statement said the detainees -- 11 Pakistanis, a Nigerian and an Indian -- are suspected of belonging to an international crime gang involved in passport forgery, drug trafficking and people-smuggling.Police said they were investigating whether the group may also have supplied forged documents to international terror groups. Spanish police often use that term to refer to Islamic extremist organizations, but a police official refused to say if that applied this time.Earlier, news reports citing police sources said 15 people had been arrested on suspicion of forging passports for use by al-Qaida members. Police in Madrid said they could not comment on that.Eleven of the arrests took place in Barcelona and two in the eastern city of Valencia. Police agents wore masks to conceal their identities.The statement said the group is suspected of having contacts in Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland and Thailand.The group allegedly stole passports in Spain and forwarded them to Thailand, where they were altered before being sent back to crime gangs in Europe.In the operation, police seized numerous false and blank passports and material used for forging documents.Dozens of suspected radical Islamic militants have been arrested in Spain since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington, and again after the commuter train bombings in 2004 in Madrid.On Jan. 20, six Pakistanis were arrested in Barcelona on suspicion of tax fraud and diverting funds to Islamic terror groups. They were released days later for lack of evidence.

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