A man arrested for allegedly luring a nine-year-old boy to his home before killing him was on parole after having been sentenced to 30 years in prison for a prior murder and sex offences.
Francisco Javier Almeida López de Castro, 54, is being held in a police cell after some residents of the town of Lardero in Spain’s La Rioja province tried to lynch him during his arrest.
Almeida had been on parole for 18 months having been jailed for the murder of an estate agent in Logroño in August 1998. The woman was showing Almeida a flat he pretended he wanted to rent when he attacked her, stabbing her 17 times.
A year before the murder he had been released from prison after serving a seven-year sentence for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl, whom he tricked into going to his flat.
Last week he approached two boys in a park where children and parents were holding a Halloween party and invited them back to his flat, on the third floor of a building 100 metres away, “to see a puppy”.
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Only one of the children, aged nine, went with him, and within minutes of the boy’s disappearance his parents called the police and a search began immediately. The victim, according to several witnesses, was dressed as the girl from the movie The Exorcist. Detectives believe that Almeida mistook him for a girl.
Civil Guards quickly found Almeida with the child dead in his arms in the common areas of the building where he lived. They immediately called an ambulance but doctors were unable to revive the child.
Almeida claimed that he found the boy unconscious, but the Civil Guards arrested him and, following a tense standoff with about 200 angry neighbours, transferred him to a local holding cell.
In the two weeks before the child died, locals made two complaints to police about the suspect attempting to abduct children.
“You called us crazy . . . and now a child has had to die for you to all come along here and protect the murderer,” one female resident shouted at police officers as they removed the suspect from an angry crowd at the crime scene.
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Carolina Marín told reporters: “Two weeks ago he tried to take my daughter. She was playing with other girls in the area and this man appeared, telling her to come with him, that he wanted to show her something.”
She added: “Fortunately she was suspicious and came back, along with another of her friends, to where we were.” A judge refused bail for the suspect, who invoked his right not to make any declaration.
A relative of the dead child told a television news programme that while it was “wrong to say it”, he could not resist the desire for vengeance.
“It is not right that a man with a criminal record, and whom the Ministry of the Interior released before he finished serving a sentence, has done what he has done,” said the uncle of the grieving mother, identified only by his first name, Gonzalo.
“It could have been any kid in this area, a murderer of this calibre cannot be at large. He should be in jail for the rest of his life.”