A 50-year-old woman has given a harrowing account of the torture she endured after being kidnapped and held for a week inside a drug den in Alicante’s Juan XXIII neighborhood. The interview, broadcast on Cuatro’s “En boca de todos,” came days after the National Police confirmed the arrest of an Algerian national accused of leading the attack.
In her testimony, the victim — identified only as Eva — described being tied up, beaten, burned, and raped repeatedly over seven days. Speaking from her hospital bed, she said she was awaiting surgery in the burns unit for injuries to her chest and abdomen. “Half of my body is burned,” she said, explaining that her attackers used a blowtorch to torture her. “They cut my hair with a knife, and that’s when the torture began with the blowtorch. The next day, the rapes began.”
Eva said she was taken to the apartment by a woman she knew, who told her that some “friends from San Juan” wanted to meet her. “When I got there, I went to the bathroom. I took a few puffs from a joint, and when I came out, she was gone,” Eva recalled. “Then he came in and punched me so hard he destroyed my eye. He hit me again in the ear, then tied me up with zip ties. I was on the floor when the torture began.”
“Who were these bastards?” asked the interviewer, to which Eva replied, “Three Arab Algerians.”
She said she was kept locked in a small room “lined with cardboard” to muffle her screams, where she was burned and assaulted daily. “I wanted to die from the first moment,” she said through tears. “I couldn’t understand why a person could do that without even knowing you, just by your face.”
By the seventh day, Eva said she was convulsing and feverish from her injuries. “They said they were going to put me in a car and dump me in an empty field so I’d die there,” she said. She only survived after another woman — the same acquaintance who had brought her to the apartment — briefly returned. “I told her, ‘Help me, call the police, get out of here, look what they’ve done to me. What they’ve done to me, they’ll do to you too.'”
The woman fled and contacted police the next day. When officers arrived, they found Eva lying semi-conscious on the floor, suffering from burns on her torso and legs. “When the police came in, they were like angels,” she said. “Most of them knew me, but they hadn’t recognized me because they’d cut off my hair.”
According to the National Police, the ordeal began on Nov. 1. The main suspect, an Algerian man, has been charged with kidnapping, sexual assault, and torture. Two other men — one Algerian and one Spanish citizen — were present during the assault and are accused of unlawful detention for preventing Eva from escaping. Both claimed they acted under duress.
Police said the main suspect had been arrested the previous night on an unrelated charge, which helped investigators locate him quickly once Eva’s statement was taken. He has since been remanded in pre-trial detention.
Authorities say the investigation remains open to establish the full circumstances of the crime and the degree of involvement of the other two suspects.
