Yousef Mohamed Lehrech, alias El Pastilla, was arrested yesterday after spending 33 days in search and capture after escaping from the Alcalá-Meco prison. The German authorities hunted him down more than 2,000 kilometers from the Madrid prison, in a train station in Leipzig, in eastern Germany, after a laborious investigation in which police from several countries participated. The prisoner – who has two convictions for murder behind him – avoided leaving clues in his escape, but finally a closed-circuit television camera (almost) gave him away, although several checks had to be made first.
The story of the most notorious escape in recent years began on December 23. The day before Christmas Eve, when family and friends of the Alcalá-Meco prisoners flood the prison to have meetings with their loved ones on the occasion of Christmas. El Pastilla, at 20 years old, was serving time for the murder of one of the leaders of the organized mafias in Ceuta and for that of another man whom he mistook as a member of a rival gang. He had arrived at the Alcalá de Henares prison a few weeks ago from Algeciras where he had had all kinds of conflicts with another group of inmates. He was listed at the highest level of monitoring.
That Christmas afternoon he took advantage of the continuous movement of visitors to evade security controls. She mingled with family members without prison officials detecting his escape. There was no violence or intimidation. A clean escape that was not detected until a few hours later, when the protocols were activated, informing the Security Forces and Corps of the escape that would mark the soap opera of last Christmas: the multiple murderer was on the loose. It was then that the police investigation began, which ended yesterday with his arrest.
The National Police has relied on the European network of serious and urgent fugitives. Agents from the fight against organized crime have been involved in case the fugitive could be in national territory. The first analyzes carried out by the investigators with the investigations of the escape and the itinerary followed by the fugitive took the agents to Montpellier. The French police carried out verification work on his stay in this city in the south of France.
However, the investigation soon led to Germany, until he was captured in the home of a family in Cologne who was sheltering the escapee. The Police stalked his steps until “a person similar to the fugitive” was seen by a closed-circuit television camera near the home of the allegedly accomplice family. However, there was not enough certainty about his identity. It was then that the Scientific Police's Physionomic Group came into play to check if the face that the camera had captured was that of El Pastilla. Positive check.
For this reason, the German counterparts were asked to exercise extreme caution regarding possible movements, in case they had realized that the Police had practically hunted him. Indeed, El Pastilla was fleeing from the Colonia home. He was arrested near Leipzig station, more than 400 kilometers from the previous city. When he was detected, as reported by the Police, he could not be identified. He refused and did not have documentation. The agents had to carry out a fingerprint check to verify that he was Yousef Mohamed Lehrech.
