costa blanca community

The 49 year old alleged aggressor will appear in court on Monday.

A 49 year old man, named with the initials J.T.N. has been arrested in Pontevedra after allegedly strangling his 42 year old wife in the presence of their six children. It was one of the children who alerted the police.

Friends and neighbours of the victim say that she had never once complained of any problems with her husband. They described her as ‘happy and extrovert’.
The family had been living in Portas, Pontevedra for six months.

So far this year 64 women have died at the hands of their partners in Spain.
The domestic violence helpline in Spain is 016.

How can you prove that something existed when all traces have been erased and you didn’t know what was there in the first place?

El País has been leading the crusade to find out first, whether CIA flights carrying prisoners from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay used Spain as a stop-over, and then second who knew about such flights.

The Spanish National Court opened an investigation to the affair in 2005, and it was in November that year that El País lead their front page with the claim, initially, that airports on the Balearic Islands and in Andalucía had been used for the secret transport of the prisoners.

Whether the transport of such prisoners was legal or not is not the question we are discussing here. The Spanish Attorney General says he will investigate the ‘illegal transfer of prisoners’ as he put it, so we leave that to him.

The fact that such flights took place now seems established beyond doubt, and with a new statement from the left wing coalition I.U. last Friday listing all the prisoners on two of the flights in 2002 by name, indicates there can be little doubt that prisoners were carried on them, despite the denials by some politicians, oddly including the current Foreign Minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, that was the case. For example, Briton Richard Belmar is named on one flight RCH319Y which stopped in Rota on October 28 2002, and the left wingers list the other 23 prisoners on board, as well as listing flight numbers and stop-overs until as late as October 2006.

Ex Spanish Prime Minister, José María Aznar, now out of power, and totally lacking any repentance for including Spain in the invasion of Iraq, now openly says, in a shortly to be published interview in Vanity Fair, he gave permission for the flights from a position of solidarity with an ally. But when he lost the General Election in 2004 the political climate was far different, with the Partido Popular extremely angry and sore at the loss of the poll in those heady days of conspiracy theories of ETA involvement in the Madrid Train Bombings just two days earlier.

The Zapatero government has continuously denied any knowledge about the CIA flights, only admitting to declassifying the documents it had on the matter in February 2007 at the request of the National Court, by which time the European Parliament consider that the Canary Islands and Mallorca had been the main stop-overs for the flights.

But the whole matter took on a new twist on Thursday last week when the Prime Minister was questioned on live television about the flights by journalist Iñaki Gabilondo. Gabilondo was following up on top secret documents which had been printed recently in El País, and which showed that the Aznar administration had responded affirmatively to a United States request for stop-over space, and had done so in less than 24 hours.

The originals and the copies of these documents are reported to have gone missing, and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero indicated that in fact that was part of a massive erasing of computer files before he and his Socialist government took over power. Now that is a pretty strong accusation to make, and immediately afterwards the current leader of the Partido Popular, Mariano Rajoy, called on the Prime Minister to prove his claim in the courts.

But how can you prove that something existed when all traces have been erased, and you didn’t know what was there in the first place?

Deputy Prime Minister, María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, speaking Friday after the weekly cabinet meeting, was also sure of her words ‘Before abandoning power, José María Aznar ordered the erasing of the computer archives in the Presidencia offices’.

So what makes the Government so sure of its ground? Well even those with only a basic knowledge of computing know that if you really want to get rid of computer files you need to do more than drag them to the waste bin. Hard disks continue to hold the details of such casually erased material, and the Aznar administration knew this. El País told us Saturday that they contracted a specialist company to come and erase the files at a cost of 12,000 €.

The Zapatero administration is so sure of the facts, because when they came to power they found the bill, which had been left for them to pay. Whether that was great style or great stupidity by the previous administration remains to be seen, but it does raise serious questions about continuity of Government when a new team takes over. Is such a specialist company currently working on certain computers in Washington, I wonder?

A new interchange centre for the high speed service will not need an environment study to be carried out.

The decision by the Ministry of the Environment that an environmental study is not needed for the new AVE high speed train interchange centre which is needed to be built at La Encina, means that the progress of the AVE lines to Alicante is effectively sped up.

The interchange centre will control the high speed lines to Valencia, Alicante and Albacete.

It means that work on the project can proceed immediately without a possible delay of a year or more, and that the government’s target of the AVE arrival in Alicante of 2012 can be met, despite continued confusion on how the line will enter the city itself.

The European Parliament rejects a 65 hour working week.

The European Parliament has today rejected the directive to limit the working week across the continent to 65 hours a week. Spain was among those to oppose the idea.
Now a period of talks between the Commission, Parliament and the individual governments begins, and if no agreement is reached in 90 days the idea of a limit will be binned.

The provisional decision of the competition commission in the U.K. has asked that Spanish company Ferrovial sell three of the airports it owns in the country, Gatwick, Stansted and Edinburgh. Final consolations will continue and a final report on the seven airports owned by BAA, a Ferrovial subsidiary is promised in February or March next year.

And staying with airports, the new private Central Ciudad Real airport in Spain has been given an opening licence. The permissions needed from the Ministries of Development and Environment have now been granted although there has been no decision made as yet on when regular flights might start. There were also plans to call the airport Madrid South, despite the distance it lies from the capital, but these have now been abandoned following protests from the Madrid regional government.

While in the air the Ministry for Development has called the SEPLA union pilots in Iberia to order. The Secretary of State for Transport, Fernando Palao, has said he has no doubt that the pilots have been carrying out a work to rule for the past week or so, leading to the delay and cancellation of flights. Talks between the company and the pilots restart today.

Amparo Moraleda, who has been up to now the President of IBM for Southern Europe, is set to become head of the commercial department of power giant Iberdrola.
Iberdrola took over Scottish Power in 2006 and the board needs to be strengthened. At one time she was named as a candidate for Minister in the Zapatero government.

There have been modest rallies on the European stock markets today in response to the latest interest rate cut to close to zero in the United States. In Spain the IBEX 35 was trading close to level with Acciona the biggest gainer and Sacyr Vallehermoso the biggest loser.

Three architects and their wives have been arrested in an operation carried out by the Guardia Civil.

It’s thought the shooting, which involved four people, was linked to drug trafficking.
A British person has been injured in a shooting incident in L’Ametlla de Mar in Tarragona today, in which a German man has died. The 33 year old German was shot in the thorax and abdomen and suffered a heart attack.

Spanish police think the shooting which involved four people in total was a settling of scores related to drug trafficking. An Italian is seriously hurt after being shot in the neck. He made his own way to the local health centre from where he was taken by helicopter to the Joan XXIII hospital in Tarragona where he has had surgery.

The Briton was stabbed in the thorax and treated in a local ambulance. His involvement in the affair is still being investigated and as yet he has not been arrested.

It happened at 4,30pm on Monday in a chalet in Calle Rovelló, in the Sant Jordi Alfama urbanisation in L’Ametlla.

All four men involved in the shooting and stabbing were living locally and reports say some of them have a previous record for drug trafficking.

The Spanish actress has been nominated by the United States Actors’ Union for her supporting role in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

Penélope Cruz has been nominated for yet another Best Supporting Actress award in the United States for her role in the Woody Allen film ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’.

This time the nomination comes from the United States Actors’ Union and is being seen as yet another step closer to an Oscar nomination for the role following her Golden Globe nomination.

Details of the attack which took place on Tuesday, have just been released by the Guardia Civil.

A male worker in a sex shop in Fuengirola was stabbed in the neck by a customer on Tuesday.

The 38 year old man, J.A.B.A. accused of the aggression handed himself into the Guardia Civil at their barracks in Mijas shortly after the attack which happened on Tuesday although details have only just been released.
He is being held and faces charges of attempted homicide.

Police rushed to the sex shop to find the worker bleeding profusely from a five centimetre wound. Police recovered a weapon from the scene. They took him in their patrol car to the Costa del Sol hospital in Marbella where he is recovering.

The man died from a haemorrhage, and now a full investigation is underway.

A full investigation has been opened into the death of a patient in the Virgen del Rocio hospital in Sevilla following reports that the man died after being left in a wheelchair in the emergency department for 13 hours waiting for a bed.

The patient died from a haemorrhage caused by the cancer he was suffering from.

The Prosecutors Office has opened an investigation with the possible charge of degrading treatment, and both the Ombudsman and family of the deceased have placed denuncias.

The family say the man was in tremendous pain. He was in the chair from 10am until 11pm when he bled out in a minute with a haemorrhage.

José Joaquín Moya is suffering poor health and has been admitted to the prison hospital in Fontcalent.

The instruction judge in court three in Orihuela has decided to postpone the declaration of the ex Mayor of Bigastro, José Joaquín Moya, which was set for today because of his state of health. However she refused to grant bail for him as had been requested by his defence team.

The ex Mayor is currently admitted to the prison hospital in Fontcalent. He faces questions which link him to alleged irregular employment of workers by the Bigastro Town Hall, and has been held in prison since his arrest at the end of October.