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| Antonio Ángel Ortiz Martínez |
CIUDAD LINEAL (MADRID )
– This section (barrio) of Madrid had been living the nightmare that is all too common these days: fear for the safety of their children. A paedophile had kept parents
worried for months. But their worries were over when on Thursday, September 25th
in the evening, ‘public enemy number one’ was arrested at his home in Santander and accused of
the kidnapping and rape of five girls, and attempted rape of another three. All
of the victims are under the age of 11, and the assaults had been happening
since July 2013. The police say there could be more, as during their investigation;
several unreported cases were uncovered as well.
Operation Candy had over one
hundred police units from
When Antonio Ángel Ortiz Martínez,
42 ‘though he looks younger’ according to police sources, was taken to the
cells in Madrid, having fled to his home town of Santander when he felt the
police were too close for comfort, he asked, in ‘tones of impertinence’
according to the same source, what he was being detained for. His attitude,
apparently, was ‘challenging, defiant’, despite a long record of mainly petty
crime and manifest familiarity with police and legal procedures. However, there
are no apparent symptoms of mental illness.
The first of the aggressions of
which Ortiz is accused at present were against a girl of Chinese origin, whom
Ortiz allegedly accosted at the entrance to her apartment with a bunch of keys
in his hand. He managed to convince her that he had been invited by her parents
to visit the family. Once inside, he abused her. The girls never mentioned
anything to her family.
Ortiz was allegedly meticulous
with his kidnappings, which he carried out near schools, parks and sweet shops.
But towards the end of August he slipped up. He stopped at one such shop with a
kidnap victim in his car, paid for his purchase in a great hurry, arousing the
suspicions of the sales person, who alerted the police. The whole barrio was on
alert, naturally.
The CCTV cameras at a nearby bank
got pictures of the van Ortiz used; police had to sift through 78,000 similar
vehicles because the camera angle was unable to give a clear image of its
number plates. During her testimony the girl was able to remember the man
making a phone call as he was driving, so the police had to comb through all
the telephone posts in the area and cross reference them with other information
to find at the end of the trail, a used car business for whom Ortiz
occasionally ran errands.
The alleged paedophile lived with
his mother in Madrid ,
close to the area where he allegedly committed his crimes. Another family
building, empty and undergoing reformation and only two kilometres from his
mother’s, was where he took his victims. Mother and son visited these premises
regularly; the parking garage, with only one guard on duty at any time, is
accessed directly from the building. The 107 residents never noticed anything
strange, they say, except that sometimes the shutters were up.
Ortiz, and the building had been
under daily police scrutiny for about two months before the arrest, but three
weeks ago, at a check point – one of many set up in the area at the time in the
North Eastern districts of the capital –Ortiz was clearly identified but no
arrest could be made as the police were still gathering evidence against him.
For his part, Ortiz decided to miss the family home and slept in his van.
Having checked his record, they
put him at the top of their list of suspects, when they found that he had been
found guilty of a six year old girls in the mid 1990s, for which he spent nine
years in jail.
He was watched by plainclothes
units from then on and followed him to his hideaway in Santander , 17 days ago. For some time before
that, his preferences for martial arts and attending gyms, his experience of
crime and a good measure of cunning, taught him not to have any kind of prior
relationship with his victims or their families, nor did he watch them before
hand. He would bathe the girls after raping them, having drugged them
previously so they would remember nothing. He would then abandon them in a
semi-suburban field somewhere.
The judge in the case has
scheduled a programme of identification beginning on Monday that requires the
presence of the victims. The police are doing their best to get through this as
quickly as possible, to avoid any further trauma to the victims or their
families. But their evidence is crucial: a wart identified by one of the girls,
which lead to the closing of the case.
Ciudad Lineal, the town where a
workman was almost lynched last week when he approached two little girls, is
now breathing more easily.
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