Story By: Alex Cope, Sub Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Central European News
Video Credit:CEN
This is the couple who have been arrested for allegedly luring a 54-year-old man to a meeting point on the Badoo dating application before stealing his car and burying him alive.
The 54-year-old victim, a computer technician named in reports as Jose Antonio Delgado Fresnedo, had gone missing on 9th September after he travelled from the town of Getxo, in the Basque Country, northern Spain, to the city of Zaragoza in the northern Spanish region of Aragon, reportedly to meet a woman he had met on the dating application Badoo.
Badoo is headquartered in London in the UK and has over 400 million users.
Fresnedo, who was separated, went missing after travelling to the date and his body has now been found on the outskirts of Pedrola, near Zaragoza, by a farmer.
The body was reportedly in a state of decomposition but local newspaper El Periodico de Aragon report there were signs he had been buried alive as an autopsy showed he had soil in his lungs.
The Spanish Civil Guard in Zaragoza arrested a couple, a Moroccan man identified by the police by his initials M.A.D., 35, and a Venezuelan woman, H.C.A.L., 34 in the case.
Both suspects have been charged with “murder, illegal detention, extortion and robbery with violence”, according to a police press statement.
The police said that the arrested woman used a “well-known dating portal” to show “her intention to meet men to have intimate relations” with the,.
She would then ask to meet them in “quiet places in areas close to Pedrola where the victims, on their arrival, would be violently robbed and illegally detained”.
The police statement said that the suspects wanted to take the belongings and vehicles of the victims, before using violence to “obtain the pin codes to their credit cards and then withdraw money from their bank accounts” before leaving their victims “handcuffed and hooded” in rural areas.
They have been charged with three cases of using the above modus operandi, the last of which allegedly ended with the death of Fresnedo. The other two victims have not been named.
According to reports, the victim’s body had been driven to its burial site in his own red Mercedes valued at 50,000 EUR (44,395 GBP).
The suspects allegedly tried to sell the car online for less than its value. A man interested in buying the vehicle then met with the couple who told him that the owner of the car was sick and was unable to attend the meeting, showing him the official documents of the car.
They reportedly signed a contract and the buyer paid money in advance, taking the car with him but they still needed to change the owner in the official documents and agreed to meet again.
However, reports state the couple never returned his calls so he decided to go to a police station to report the case.
The police confirmed the car had been posted on “a vehicle-trading website” and was now with a resident of Zaragoza.
The video shows the red Mercedes.
The police said in their statement that the suspects were arrested in an operation which saw “personal belongings of the murdered man seized” along with personal belongings of the other victims, “vehicles, arms, biological evidence, electronic devices, documentation and other abundant indications of their participation” in the crimes.
The images show some of the items seized in the operation. The investigation is ongoing.
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