Spain ex-pat HORROR: Pair arrested accused of killing OAPs' and stealing life savings

Officers detained the pair after a German woman whose bank account was emptied died suddenly in their care, just five hours after they had persuaded her to leave a nursing home where she told detectives they kept her hostage and mistreated her. Her fate at their hands was discovered after police in Frankfurt asked for Spanish police help to find 101-year-old Maria Babes. The arrested couple had her body cremated in record time before police were able to order an autopsy to determine how she had died.

Police revealed today another four people whose assets the couple controlled, had died suddenly in their care. 

A Dutch and German OAP were rescued from a second villa near the so-called ‘House of Horrors’ close to the upmarket resort of Novi Sancti Petri on Spain’s south-west coast. 

Civil Guard officers went public with the arrests today as they calculated the unnamed couple had allegedly stripped their suspected elderly victims of a staggering £1.5million in assets over a four-year period and tried to launder the proceeds through real estate including the construction of a tourist complex.

A well-placed source said he believed one of the suspected victims was British, although there was no immediate official confirmation of the nationalities of all of the dead and surviving OAPS.

Novo Sancti Petri is a purpose-built tourist resort with several four and five-star hotels on the Costa de la Luz which is popular with Spanish tourists as well as holidaymakers from Northern Europe.

As well as the couple, said to be of Cuban-German origin, five other people have been arrested and nine placed under formal investigation.

A spokesman for the Civil Guard in Cadiz, which led the operation dubbed Operation Teydea, confirmed: “Six people have been arrested and nine placed under investigation as the suspected authors of a series of crimes ranging from fraud to forgery, misappropriation and money laundering.

“The operation led to officers tracking down an elderly German woman and removing her from the control of her ‘carers’, who had stripped her of her assets.

“Tragically, after removing her from the control of this couple, they managed to get her out of the retirement home she had been placed in and five hours later she died suddenly.

“The Civil Guard operation led to the rescue of another two elderly people the detainees were ‘looking after’ and who were being kept prisoner, drugged, and fed using drips.

“The investigation has revealed another four people who were supposedly being looked after by this couple, had died suddenly after they got their hands on their assets.

“In four years this couple had managed to accumulate assets worth more than €1.8 million (£1.54 million).”

The force revealed in a statement how they tracked down 101-year-old Maria Babes to a retirement home in Chiclana de la Frontera near Cadiz after being asked for help by German police.

They said alarm bells started ringing after they discovered the couple under arrest had persuaded Maria to move from her expat home in Tenerife to the Spanish mainland and offered to look after her before “cancelling out her will” as they allegedly had with other suspected victims.

The Civil Guard spokesman said: “During interviews with her, she told officers she had been locked up for several months in a rented villa and during that time had been shackled. 

“During that time, and to the surprise of investigators, she supposedly gave her ‘carers’ power of attorney and then named them as her heirs.

“The German woman denied agreeing to this, and it happened while she was seriously ill in hospital.

“After the appearance of this couple in her lives in October, her bank balance went from €162,000 (£139,000) to just €300 (£257) by December.

“Her house in Tenerife was also sold during that time and she never received a penny.”

Revealing details of the hours leading up to her death, the spokesman added: “Despite the order for Maria to stay in her retirement home, the couple turned up the day before their arrest and managed to persuade her to leave with them.

“Five hours after she left she died, despite a video of her that morning playing the tambourine in a perfect state of health.

“She left the centre at 11am and her death was recorded at 4pm while she was in a car with her ‘carers’, with no other witnesses present.

“Officers subsequently discovered the people being investigated had insisted on the urgent incineration of her body, so an autopsy has not been performed.

“The funeral parlour manager highlighted the carer’s rush to initiate the incineration and the fact she didn’t want the urn with the ashes, despite expressing her utmost affection for the elderly woman.

“During the arrest of the couple and in a search of the villa, police found two aeroplane tickets to Cuba with a reservation for the Hotel Melia Varadero, which would have made it difficult for them to look after Maria if she had still been alive.”

source: express.co.uk