Two men and a woman were detained in Torrevieja and El Campello by the National Police as suspects in a roaming network that targeted houses across the province. The arrests followed a confrontation with owners who prevented a burglary at a home in Orihuela.
Residents from the Orihuela hamlet of Molins and the town of Bigastro warned in several messaging groups about a man and a woman seen trying to access multiple homes, forcing entry points to gain access to properties.
This information reached the local police station and the Judicial Police began gathering incident reports from the indicated areas, ultimately identifying the vehicle used to travel between towns to commit the robberies.
The investigators located victims of other similar robberies who had interacted with the suspects. On one occasion, the owner of a home in Molins appeared with a relative and noticed a man and a woman at the doorway, where the man stood unusually close to the door.
That detail matched what the investigators already suspected about the attackers and their vehicle.
In another incident, in the same Molins area, ten minutes earlier, the suspects were captured by the victim’s surveillance cameras approaching the entrance but never reached the door.
The third incident, recorded the following day in Bigastro, provided new data of substantial relevance. A witness filmed the pair using a mobile phone; the man pressed against the door while the woman stood watch and tried to obscure the man’s efforts to manipulate the lock.
The witness alerted another person who was with him to call the police while filming. The moment investigators suspected that they had been spotted, the pair jumped into a vehicle, apparently driven by another person, and fled.
With these leads, the Judicial Police deployed a surveillance operation aimed at locating the suspects while continuing the inquiries to identify the woman and the man and the third individual waiting in the vehicle.
Vehicle
The victim told officers that when asked about their presence at the door, the suspects offered incoherent replies and did everything possible to leave the scene quickly. She could, however, see the vehicle used to depart, a clue that corroborated the descriptions already in circulation among the investigators regarding the attackers and their car.
In another report from the same Molins resident, seen at the door ten minutes after the earlier incident, the perpetrators had been captured by the homeowner’s surveillance cameras. The footage showed the same two people at the home’s access points, but they never entered.
The investigators contacted the same day with a new lead documented in ten minutes, this time in Bigastro, where the suspects were observed by a watcher using a camera to monitor the door of a residence. The man clung to the door and tampered with the lock, while the woman kept a vigilant stance and shielded the activity with her body.
A witness alerted a companion to call the police, and the man filming with a mobile phone drew attention. A nearby neighbor then appeared; realizing they had been detected, the suspects hurried into a vehicle and fled the spot.
With all these findings, police investigators placed a special watch to locate the suspects and continued gathering further details to identify the two main individuals and the third person waiting in the car.
Identified at a checkpoint
The investigation led officers to identify the suspects during a routine Guardia Civil checkpoint, as they were traveling in the vehicle under scrutiny following one of the incidents examined.
At the checkpoint, the vehicle’s owner was found to be the driver, a woman sat in the front passenger seat, and a man sat in the rear. It emerged that the woman and the man in the back seat were the same persons seen in the Bigastro footage captured by the witness.
The police established a search operation and managed to locate and arrest the driver in Torrevieja and the woman, while the other man was detained on a street in El Campello.
During searches of their homes, authorities seized 536 euros in cash, a compressed air weapon with pellets, a set of lock picks, and a bag containing a pick and two keys.
During the inquiry, investigators noted that the suspects consistently practiced counter-surveillance to check if they were being followed. One suspect was charged with a traffic offense for driving a vehicle without a license.
Additionally, investigators learned that the stolen items were moved to other towns beyond where the robberies occurred and were offered for sale at gold-buying shops. In one store, a gold cord valued by the shop assistant at around 7,800 euros was considered for purchase, but the sale did not go through because the shop did not have the business owner’s authorization at that moment.
The three detainees, two men and a woman aged between 24 and 36, of Spanish and Uruguayan nationalities, were put at the disposal of the Orihuela court.