The squatting mafias have claimed a new victim; in this case, in the usurped building on Lola Flores Street, in the San Blas-Canillejas district, near the airport. It is an old luxury complex, built on one side of the A-2, with hundreds of loft apartments, a swimming pool, a garage, a cafeteria and a tennis court. In February, the first news of this promotion broke: Ramón Santiago Jiménez, alias “Ramón”, one of the four rapists and murderers of the young woman from Getafe, Sandra Palo, was arrested there. They accused him of having kidnapped and tortured, with other criminals, members of a Spanish clan with whom they wanted to settle scores.
Now the news is different. This Tuesday, at 4:30 p.m., Municipal Police officers burst into the building and arrested six young people (including a minor) who could belong to Latin gangs; even if the motivation for these arrests was linked to other problems. According to sources in the file, the boss who controls the squatters of the property asked them to teach one of them a lesson. He is a 25-year-old Salvadoran who would not have given in to extortion in exchange for his accommodation there. There is an injured police officer.
Those arrested are a 23-year-old Dominican; a 20-year-old Romanian; a 20-year-old Colombian; two Spaniards from Madrid, aged 21 and 19, and a Torrejonero, also from our country, aged 17. According to one of them, when he was chained, they had gone to the squat “to smoke joints”. Logically, it was a lie.
When the municipal police from the San Blas-Canillejas district general station arrived, the attackers started running. Some fled on foot, others in a vehicle. Witnesses saw them attack the Salvadoran and beat him. Officers spotted a bolomachete typical of Latin gangs, 59 centimeters long, nearby. Also two hoods. As they later reported, “the guy was new to the squat and they wanted to kick him out.” His version is somewhat different: “I wanted to change accommodation in the building and as I was crossing the common areas, a group of around ten people jumped on me.” And that’s when he explained the existence of a boss, as ABC revealed in a report last February, who rented the apartments to other squatters and lived there.
They hit him on the head with a blunt object, we don’t know if it was with the handle of the machete, and they caused him an open wound on the skull, for which the Samur-Protection Civile took him away. at the Ramón y Cajal Hospital. , although he was not seriously injured.
This same community has been without power for about two years now. Those affected then denounced that behind their houses was Rafael Gómez Arribas, owner of Ciudad Real airport and included in the list of main debtors of the Treasury in recent years. Three months after the outage, there were protest banners, broken promises from the property and even a mass email informing tenants they had to vacate their homes any day now.
Residents had to resort to candles and flashlights and then pay for their own generators. In this context, many ended up leaving, some stayed and others, as this newspaper learned, came to live for different reasons. “My boss asked me to come and live in his apartment so that it would not be squatted,” explains a neighbor, witness to the serious situation which has lasted for a year. Dozens of squatters also began to arrive in this building, little by little they colonized the property.
Currently, the alarming situation is such that the block of “legal” tenants maintains entry prohibited to the rest through its patio, moreover the ruin extends over the entire perimeter, with detached walls and false ceilings, furniture and shattered household items and walls. are stained with murals and graffiti after the passage of graffiti artists.
