“I want to go out. Call the police”. The 24-year-old woman wrote that message to a friend in a desperate attempt to get out of what had become her prison: her ex-boyfriend’s house. Shortly after, perhaps upon discovering that Whatsapp, the man smashed the phone. But the alerts were on. The girl’s mother, who feared the worst, went out into the street and did as that message asked. He stopped the first policemen he saw: “My daughter is in danger.” It happened at dawn last Friday in Madrid.
The patrol went to the house of the ex-boyfriend, on whom restraining orders had already been imposed in the past and the prohibition to communicate with his former partner. The house was in the Salamanca district of Madrid, one of the wealthiest in the capital. “I don’t know anything about her,” the 31-year-old man assured them. Calmly, he invited them to inspect the house, certain that they would find nothing. The agents reviewed the rooms and indeed, no trace of the missing woman.
But something was still not right. One of the policemen typed the girl’s number into his mobile. The one from which the distress message had been sent. “I want out,” she had written. At that moment, they heard a mobile phone tune between those four walls. The captor had tried to smash the device, but had only succeeded in shattering the screen. Faced with the man’s meaningless explanations, the policemen strove to search for him in the house. And there under the bed in his bedroom, they found the answer.
Under the mattress they found a door that opened and led to some kind of basement. And there was a chest there. The agents opened it and after a pile of clothes and rags, they found the woman and rescued her. Her ex-boyfriend had forced her into the trunk when he had seen the police through the peephole and had parked her in that basement, with the aim of prolonging her captivity. But the cell phone gave him away.
The woman left that chest and that cellar and returned to the street, with her family. He has been arrested accused of kidnapping, gender violence and for breaking the measures that had already been imposed on him. The tables turned.
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