Marcos was shot dead and no one knows why. This 49-year-old Spanish businessman of Moroccan origin was running several entertainment venues in 2019 when he was shot multiple times in the middle of the night in his home in the Guadalmina urbanization, in Marbella (Málaga, 150,725 inhabitants). Two hitmen waited for her to enter the terrace with his car, a black Bentley, and they snuck in seconds later. They shot him first in the back and then at point-blank range from the window. They fled, but a minute later one of them returned to steal his wallet. Then they both disappeared in a car that was found burned two days later. Almost five years later, the cause of the murder is unknown. There is no cell phone. And it is a point on which all the parties involved agree: prosecutor, private prosecution, defense and police in the trial against the two accused as authors of the events. Nobody knows the reason. For them, permanent, reviewable prison is requested for the crimes of belonging to a criminal group, murder, illicit possession of weapons and damage by fire.
The first day of the judicial process was used to elect the popular jury that will give its verdict at the end of this week. Also for the two alleged hitmen to give their versions and for the National Police agents who carried out the investigation to explain how they concluded that the two, of Dutch nationality, committed the murder after receiving the order from someone who is still unknown. In the center is the victim, Marcos, who had been living in Marbella for three decades. “His murder was an absolute surprise,” explained lawyer Salvador Guerrero, who represents the businessman’s son. He ran several stores in Puerto Banús without apparent problems or discussions with anyone. Among his properties were establishments Linekers either Babylon. Also Rotana, precisely from which the police hypotheses propose that his murderers followed him to his house to kill him. The reason? “No idea. It is not known,” says one of the police officers who has led the case.
Why it was commissioned remains a mystery. The motive is as important for investigators to find out as the clues that in this case have allowed them to reach the identity of the two accused. A complex task given the professionalism of the hitmen; and its dangerousness, which is why the agents who have testified have done so with their faces hidden behind a balaclava. The murderers also had it hidden when they acted. In the video collected by the residence’s security cameras, you can see them sneaking behind the car and shooting the businessman in the back. He “was shot a lot. He tried to fight, but against a firearm it is impossible,” one of the police officers stressed when asked by the Prosecutor’s Office. The images show that the space to park the vehicle was so narrow that the victim could not even open the door completely before one of the murderers finished him off from the window. After what seems to be the end of the sequence, a minute later one of the perpetrators reappears, opens the passenger door, takes the wallet from the victim’s pocket and flees.
In the courtroom, one of the accused followed the images with interest. The other did not turn to see the video and kept his gaze lost. In the audience, several relatives of the murdered man did not want to look either. “We have no recordings where their faces can be seen, nor fingerprints or traces of DNA. It is logical that this is the case because the accused are precisely amateurs. What they did was about to turn out well, but they underestimated the police experience,” said lawyer Guerrero. “Paper holds everything and in this case there is a lot of literature,” added Luis Miguel Ruiz, defense attorney for one of the alleged murderers. “My experience tells me that they always fail: if they did not make mistakes, our work would be impossible,” said the head of the organized crime group that led the investigation. The photo that one of the accused uploaded to social networks indicating that he was in Marbella or the use of his cell phone during the preparation of the murder were some of them. They also talked on the phone about commissioning another murder “and even boasted about it that same morning,” according to conversations intercepted by the police on their terminals.
They controlled their movements
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The lack of evidence and a specific cause for the murder slowed down police work, but people were connecting the dots little by little. First through information that came to them from the Netherlands and later through the geolocations of the defendants’ phones. The information obtained allowed one of them to be placed in Rotana the night the murder happened. Also verify that he left the premises just when the victim did and that he followed him during the trip to his house, making up to thirteen calls to one of his cronies. Then his phones coincided at the house after three in the morning. And also in the place on the Ojén highway where the car they used was burned, a black Audi A4 stolen months before in Cádiz. That is to say, its presence coincides in the three essential points of the case. One of the agents who testified insisted that the businessman had fixed schedules and routines and that this made it easier for them to control his movements to determine when to kill him. Another one of the police officers stressed that the person who contacted one of the hitmen is a person being investigated for eight murders in the Netherlands. Hence, it is believed that the accused were part of a dangerous criminal organization.
The two alleged murderers have declared they had nothing to do with the events. One of them, who was barely 18 years old in 2019, said that he was in Marbella because he went to visit his uncle and that he visited him frequently because he liked the city a lot. Born in Amsterdam, he studied to be a plumber, played soccer at a semi-professional level and knows six languages. He pointed out that he traveled in January because he had a few days of vacation and that on the night of the murder he had been partying in Puerto Banús with a French girl. He borrowed a car “in case he flirted” and went with her, although they finally left separately, justifying the thirteen calls by saying that he had lost the keys to her apartment and needed a copy of it. The second explained that he has lived in Marbella for more than a decade and that he worked giving boxing classes to children in a gym in Puerto Banús, although he also brokered some vehicle sales operations. He stressed that “not a fool” would have participated in the events and that the day of his arrest was the “worst” of his life. Both have been in preventive detention since their arrest in March 2020.
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