Mother and daughter say man swindled them out of €7,000 fee to kill mother’s partner

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A Spanish woman and her daughter have been arrested after going to a police station to complain that the man they hired to carry out a murder had swindled them out of the €7,000 (£6,300) they paid him.

The investigation began earlier this month, when the pair told police in Madrid that the mother’s partner had cheated them out of a total of €60,000.

It later emerged the daughter’s partner, who claimed to be a senior member of Spain’s secret services, had suggested they recover the lost money by killing the mother’s boyfriend.

They paid him a €7,000 downpayment on the understanding he would arrange to have the mother’s boyfriend killed and sell the dead man’s organs to raise the €60,000.

When the killing failed to take place, the mother and daughter felt defrauded and went to the police again.

“Officers then proceeded to arrest the two women and set about tracing and arresting the male suspect,” Madrid police said in a statement. “They have not ruled out the possibility that he may have swindled other people.”

They said the three suspects were waiting to appear before a judge and that the victim of the plot had been found “in perfect health”.

The Spanish news agency Efe reported that the three suspects were all Spanish citizens, with no criminal records. They did not give their names, in line with Spanish police practice, but Efe reported that the mother was 52, the daughter 20 and the daughter’s boyfriend 29.

Officers are looking into the background of the man and how he came to have false documents bearing the logo of the state intelligence agency, the National Intelligence Centre.

They also found a document in which he had allegedly laid out how he planned to carry out the killing and sell the victim’s organs.

According to Efe, the man had a fake CV, which claimed he was a lieutenant colonel, an expert marksman and a specialist in interrogation and “elimination”. It also said he spoke 22 languages, including Bengali and Hawaiian.