Months ago, Mahdi made a hole in the back wall of what had been his house in Las Pedroñeras (Cuenca). In the wall that connects the house with an interior patio. He did this to enter the house that he was prohibited from accessing due to the restraining order he had on his wife, Amal. From time to time, in the early hours of the morning, he would climb over the roofs to fall at that same point, sneak into the house and continue to make her live in terror. She asked her relatives and neighbours for help to cover him, but he managed to open the hole again and again. It was in that patio where the Civil Guard found the body of the 30-year-old woman on Saturday. Beneath her were the bodies of the couple’s children, Adam, eight years old, and Hiba, three.
Amal worked in municipal schools. He went there every day on time, with his white car, which he always parked afterwards in front of his house. On Friday at noon, the vehicle was there at an unusual time, when she should have been at her workplace. That was the day that Mahdi was fighting on his day, in the slaughterhouse. The neighbors and her relatives were surprised by her. One of Amal’s closest friends called her friends to see if they knew anything about her or her children. No one had seen them all day and no one in the house answered. That same day, Civil Guard agents in the area received the alert with the model and license plate of her husband’s car in case she tried to escape from the town. It was not necessary, according to sources close to the case, the man was detained near the woman’s house.
From the beginning, the suspicion that the man had done something to his family was the main hypothesis. The Civil Guard agents went to the home of the woman and the children on Saturday morning. Next to the house, there is an abandoned house in poor condition, which they accessed by cutting the chains on the door with pliers. It was from this building that the Civil Guards managed to access the patio where Mahdi had allegedly left the bodies of his victims. In the house they also found a lot of bloody clothing and a knife that is suspected to have been the murder weapon. The first investigations indicate that the detainee committed the murder inside the house and then dragged the bodies to the patio. They were not dismembered or inside a freezer, as had been published according to the first reports.
Mahdi had been sentenced to prison for mistreating his wife weeks ago. The date that the judge had set for his imprisonment was “imminent”, according to sources close to the case. He was well known to the police officers in the area. He had been living in Las Pedroñeras for 15 years and his record was full of arrests for assaulting an authority figure, many of them while intoxicated, and also for domestic violence against a woman. She was included in the VioGén system, but did not have a high level of protection. According to a family member who asks not to be identified for fear of Mahdi, he said that he had said many times that he was not going to go to prison and leave her out. This same source says that once she caught him hitting Amal in the street, she confronted him and since then she had damaged his car on several occasions in revenge.
The bodies were recovered early Saturday afternoon. The autopsy will reveal how Mahdi allegedly ended the lives of Amal and her son and daughter. Late in the day, several residents of this town of 6,500 inhabitants gathered in the Plaza de la Constitución to pay tribute to these three new victims of gender-based violence. Three cardboard boxes simulating graves, six purple candles and a large crepe of the same colour represented Amal, Adam and Hiba.
When the sexist nature of this triple murder is officially confirmed, the number of murdered minors will rise to nine so far this year and will be equal to 2015, the only one since there has been a record (in 2013) that includes that figure. So far this year, 16 women have been murdered by their partners or ex-partners; since the beginning of the official statisticsin 2003, there are 1,260 women, to which will be added the last three murdered in these 24 hours, another woman in Fuengirola and a 20-year-old in Zafarraya (Granada). And the mother of that woman, who was also killed by her daughter’s ex, would become part of the statistics of femicides, which began in 2022 and which Until last March, 56 women were murdered outside the sphere of their partner or ex-partner..
The 016 telephone line serves victims of gender-based violence, their families and those around them 24 hours a day, every day of the year, in 53 different languages. The number is not recorded on the telephone bill, but the call must be deleted from the device. You can also contact them via email. [email protected] and by WhatsApp at the number 600 000 016. Minors can contact the ANAR Foundation telephone number 900 20 20 10. If it is an emergency situation, you can call 112 or the National Police telephone numbers (091) and the Civil Guard (062). And if you cannot call, you can use the ALERTCOPS application, from which an alert signal is sent to the Police with geolocation.
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