Alex Trelinski
TWO men have been arrested in Palma and Malaga for killing a young German tourist in Mallorca after they threw him out of a van straight in the path of an oncoming car.
The German, 20, known as Tim V. died on October 8 last year with the initial view being that because he was drunk, he did not know what he was doing.
He stepped in front of a car on the Ma-19 Llucmajor motorway a few metres from the turn for Playa de Palma- where he was staying with a friend.
A Renault Clio driver had no chance to break to avoid hitting the young man and the tourist’s cause of death was deemed to have been caused by excess alcohol consumption.
But when the story hit the local media, an eye witness contacted the police to say he saw a body being thrown from a white van at the time Tim’s death happened.
The Homicide unit of the Policia Nacional confirmed there was no way that he could have walked to the motorway based on where his last image was taken.
That prompted the start of an exhaustive inquiry to find the van.
Angel Ruiz from the Policia Nacional in the Balearics said: “The first thing we did was to collect a huge amount of camera footage from the area where the incident took place to identify the make and model.”
“We contacted the manufacturer, the General Directorate of Traffic and obtained a list of more than 95,000 vans of that make and model in Spain,” he added.
The Homicide unit then focused on vans on Mallorca and ran details across 10 million number plates on Spain’s database.
After over a year of work, one van came under suspicion with the signage of a company which was stored in a garage.
It was discovered that the person who drove it no longer worked for the firm which complicated investigations to locate the killer or killers.
He was found a week ago(October 23) and was arrested but released shortly afterwards as he had nothing to do with what happened as two men had taken the van without his consent.
The police net quickly tightened, and that same day a man was arrested in Malaga and the following day another in Palma as the alleged killers
Angel Ruiz said the two men, who have police records, some of them for robbery with violence, committed the crime ‘on the spur of the moment’ and that the victim Tim V. had no previous contact with the criminals who wanted to rob him, but then threw him onto the motorway when he was unconscious.
It’s not been possible to determine if he died when he was thrown from the van.
“He was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Ruiz.
No more information has been released about the two arrested men.
