Since his daring escape last December 23 in the tumult of the departure of visitors from the Alcalá-Meco prison (Madrid), Yousef Lehrech, popularly known as The Pastilla, became the primary objective of the National Police Fugitives group. The young and alleged 21-year-old hitman, investigated for two murders, had, in the opinion of investigators, “at least three options” to continue his improvised escape, taking advantage of a possible error in the control of the penitentiary center, which is now being purged. from the General Directorate of Penitentiary Institutions dependent on the Ministry of the Interior. El Pastilla was arrested this Thursday at the Leipzig train station (Germany), during a routine identification check carried out by German citizen security agents, according to investigation sources. Some “anonymous” information had reached the German police weeks after his escape from attendees of a mosque in Cologne and claimed that El Pastilla frequented this temple. The first two options that investigators considered after his escape were that he try to reach Morocco, his family's country of origin, or that he return to his hometown, Ceuta, “where he knew how to hide,” explain the agents who have been in charge. of the operation.
The agents of the Drugs and Organized Crime Unit (UDYCO) of Ceuta and Algeciras and the Special Response Group for Organized Crime (GRECO) in Cádiz, for whom El Pastilla was an old acquaintance—despite his youth—extremely vigilant. in their neighborhood and controlled the movements of “their people.” All of them “knew the entire life and miracles” of the young hitman, in addition to his crimes and his whims. They soon came to the conclusion that they would not cross to Morocco because there they govern the Tayena, the group that competes for control of drug trafficking in Ceuta with the Piolín organization, for which El Pastilla had allegedly worked as a hitman. The police accuse him of being the material murderer of Nayim KA, alias Tayena and leader of that criminal gang, whom he allegedly executed with a shot to the chest as he left his house in Los Barrios (Cádiz) on April 12. “Going to Morocco was not an option for him, there he is threatened with death,” the investigators argue.
In addition, he is charged with a second murder of a young man whom he allegedly confused with another person from the rival gang. For both crimes, the police arrested him at the end of last May in the port of Algeciras. He was admitted to the Cádiz prison but, due to “his high degree of conflict”, he was classified as level five in the Inmate File. of Special Monitoring (FIES) and transferred to the Alcalá-Meco prison, where he had barely arrived when he fled.
The surveillance and investigations in Ceuta and Algeciras by the police, who knew that El Pastilla is a type of criminal “made on the street, in the open, capable of spending days locked up on water and bread”, bore fruit in after a few days, and they opened a new possible line of investigation: “He could have fled to the south of France, where he had family and friends.”
In parallel, the agents of the central group of Fugitives included Yousef Lehrech in the European Network of Active Search Teams for Fugitives ENFAST, where agents are specifically dedicated, 24 hours a day, to locating fugitives from justice in Europe. In addition, they appealed to citizen collaboration and distributed different photographs of the escapee, with very marked facial features, in case someone saw him somewhere.
“Information of all kinds began to arrive,” the researchers recall. “They had seen him in the supermarket, in squares, at bus and train stations…,” they say. Until they found a French clue that they could fit in Montpellier. However, after alerting their French counterparts, that trail was lost.
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Life in Cologne
It was not until several weeks later that “anonymous” information reached the German police stating that El Pastilla was frequenting a mosque in Cologne. Thus began surveillance of the area by German agents who managed to locate him in an apartment of a Moroccan family in the city and capture him, hidden under a hood and with his head down looking at his mobile phone, with security cameras close to him. Muslim temple.
That image, released after his capture by the police, was sent to the Spanish scientific police, who analyzed it with facial recognition systems and confirmed that it was him. However, surveillance of the apartment in which he was supposedly found was unsuccessful, according to investigation sources.
When it seemed that “the target” had moved and had once again lost track of him, the luck factor entered the scene: “Some Leipzig citizen security agents stopped him during a routine identification check at the train station.” train, and the alert went off, which was later confirmed with his fingerprint,” say the investigators, who at the moment have not been able to decipher what steps he took to reach the German city from Madrid.
With a European Arrest Warrant in force, El Pastilla is expected to be extradited to Spain in the next ten days and returned to prison, although it remains to be seen which one.
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