The Town Crier Newspaper

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Tickets are already on sale for this year’s Terral music festival in Malaga on www.teatrocervantes.es. The line-up features top artists such as James Blunt, The Magnetic Fields, Diana Krall, Herbie Hancock, Lou Reed, Erykah Badu, Macy Gray, Loreena McKennit, and Madeleine Peyroux. All the concerts will be held in the Cervantes Theatre at the end of June and start of July, except for the one featuring Lou Reed, as a larger venue is being sought for his concert.

Thanks to closer collaboration between the British and the Spanish police, eight British fugitives from justice have been arrested on the Costa del Sol over the past 18 months, according to Rob Wainwright, the International Deputy Director of the British Agency for Serious Organised Crime, SOCA. Mr Wainright told a press conference last Thursday that the level of cooperation between the two police forces had resulted in “the most productive period in generations”. SOCA, London’s Metropolitan Police and the Spanish National Police joined forces in the new scheme in 2006. Mr Wainright said those arrested, who were generally living a life of luxury on the Costa del Sol, included Paul Bures, wanted for sexual crimes, John Seton, who is accused of murder, and James Hurley, who killed a policeman when escaping custody in 1994. He said that the so-called “Operación Captura” showed how important collaboration between countries is in catching criminals in this globalised world. He also praised the European Arrest Warrants, which he said had speeded up procedures between EU countries considerably.

Malaga’s Provincial Court sentenced a British man to 12-and-a-half years in jail last week for stabbing to death a friend of his father’s who he was staying with him in Torremolinos in May 2006. The man, using a false name, had arrived at the house in Los Alamos after a trip to Thailand. He told the court he had hidden the body but denied killing the man. The murder took place at the beginning of May but the body was not discovered in a room in the house until the 24th. Of that month. The man was also ordered to pay 150,000 euros in compensation to the victim’s family. The jury reached the guilty verdict unanimously after they heard that the man had already been sentenced to life in prison in Britain for homicide and arms trafficking.

The 2007 report by Malaga province’s Drug-dependency Centre (CPD) shows that the use of cocaine by young people on the Costa del Sol is increasing in an alarming rate according to a new report. CPD director Francisco Luque told a press conference last week that the average age of consumers is now between 25 and 30, and the number of middle class addicts who use the drug at weekends but go to work normally during the week is also on the increase. Sr Luqie said 246 new addicts were registered last year, up 24% on 2006. He warned that many people were spending a great deal of money on the drug. As a result, they ended up isolating themselves for normal social activities in their lives, and eventually generated problems in society. Sr Luque said the rehabilitation process usually took six to eight months and was generally successful if social and labour conditions are favourable. Meanwhile, the police busted a gang of drug traffickers in Campillos, who were moving cocaine dissolved in bottles of white wine. They seized two bottles of wine containing a kilo of the drug from a shipment which had been brought in from Mendoza in Argentina and distributed along the Malaga coast. Two Spaniards and two Colombians were arrested.

Three people were killed when a stolen 4×4 crashed head-on into a car on the coastal road between Mazagón and Palos de la Frontera in Huelva province last Thursday night. The car’s driver and his woman passenger were killed instantly as was a passing cyclist, who was hit by the car. The woman passenger was a Romanian who had been working in the local strawberry fields. She had gone shopping in Palos de la Frontera after leaving work and had hitched a ride to the rural lodgings she shared with other strawberry pickers. The driver was from Punta Umbria. The woman had been in the car less than five minutes when the accident happened. Police arrested two of the men in the stolen 4×4 shortly after the accident and picked up the third man, an African, early Friday morning. The Guardia had spotted the men robbing the 4×4 in the town and had given chase. Two of the men were injured in the accident but the African managed to escape on foot.

A woman was killed by a shot in a Malaga street last Friday afternoon when she was caught up in a fight between two men, one of whom was armed with a gun. Police said the woman, who was in her 30s, was walking through the crime-ridden La Palma district of the city when the two men started arguing. The police had already been called in by reports of a disturbance but the woman had appeared on the scene before they were able to clear the area. They said a full investigation was under way but everything indicated that the woman had nothing to do with the two men. She had just been unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Guardia Civil arrested a total of six men in different operations in Alhaurin de la Torre last week. The rise in break-ins in the town had forced concerned residents to form vigilante groups earlier this year. However, the Guardia’s new tactic of unobtrusive foot patrols appears to be giving results. The arrests last week solved at least 15 crimes - mainly house and car break-ins. Apparently, the men arrested were all Spanish.

Iberia Airlines plans to reduce its flights to Malaga and Barcelona by 15% because of string competition from the new AVE high speed trains operating between these two cities and Madrid. A spokesman said the use of smaller planes had not made much a dent on the company’s fuel bill, which would not be too onerous this year because the company had managed to buy half of its annual fuel needs for around 83 dollars per barrel.

The good news for car owners is that the Junta de Andalucia plans to enlarge the ITV (MoT) station in Estepona to shorten the queues. As of next month, the station will have an extra inspection line and should be able to inspect up to 210 vehicles a day. Car owners currently have to wait up to a month after applying for an inspection date and the new line should reduce that by up to half. People have been turning up without an appointment but a spokesman advised them not to do so because the staff have a quota to fulfil and once that has been met, they cannot attend to those who turn up on the off-chance.