A loud bang woke Javier, who began to move restlessly around the room.
–Hide in the closet with the child. Come on! Quick!– he shouted to his wife.
It was three in the morning in the Can Fornaca urbanization of Riudarenes. He went outside. He walked a few steps and saw them in the darkness. They were waiting in the chalet opposite. Their gazes met and they advanced towards him.
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–We’re going to kill you, you son of a bitch.
Javier –the name is fictitious– turned around. He didn’t know how many there were. He estimated there were about five; in reality, there were ten. They were hooded. He only clearly saw what they were carrying in their hands.
They weren’t looking for money or jewelry, but the 410 marijuana plants hidden upstairs
He couldn’t know it yet, but he had just come face to face with the most violent drug-robber gang in the area.
The raid had been preparing for days. A week earlier, a man and a woman had discreetly watched the house and its surroundings, driving an Opel Corsa. The gang leader gave the green light to the operation and set the date of the assault for the early morning of December 20. The meeting point was a gas station in Tordera. The surveillance couple arrived first, at 2:18 AM. The rest arrived from different points in Maresme: Canet, Malgrat de Mar, Arenys, and Calella.
“We’ll still be five minutes,” one of them wrote.
While waiting, the couple sat down calmly to have a coffee.
The first shots were fired from a distance. Javier had time to get inside the house. The bullets hit the facade and the main door. He ran to the bathroom, lifted a false ceiling panel, and pulled out a pistol. The group had already surrounded the house. Some were banging on the main door, and others were trying to break down the back door with an axe. They did not stop shooting at any point.
Javier responded by pulling the trigger until a bullet hit him in the abdomen. Writhing in pain, he tried to reach the room. The assailants had already entered the house. Another shot hit his left leg. He managed to reach the bedroom, where his wife and one-year-old son were still hidden in the closet. They were on top of him.
One of the attackers unsheathed a katana. Javier stopped the first blow with his left hand, and the blade caused a deep cut. He fell to the ground. The aggressor continued to strike with the sword, causing more wounds to his leg and again to his abdomen.
–Give us the money and everything you have– he ordered in Spanish with an Arabic accent.
Holding his protruding viscera, Javier succumbed. He handed them 1,000 euros in cash, two luxury watches, and several pieces of jewelry.
When the gang fled, the woman came out of the closet in a panic and pressed the SOS button of the private security company they had hired. The operator immediately alerted the Mossos d’Esquadra.
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–In a house in the Can Fornaca urbanization, there’s a woman screaming.
During the attack, one of the assailants’ balaclavas slipped down. Javier recognized him instantly: he was a young Maghrebi man he frequently saw in a bar in Tordera.
The watches were never the target. Neither was the money. What they were really looking for was the marijuana plantation Javier was hiding on the upper floor of the house. The Mossos found 410 plants with a complete indoor setup that was powered by tapping into the electricity. LED reflective panels, transformers to regulate electrical flow, air conditioning units, carbon filters to neutralize the strong smell of the plants, fans, extractor boxes for air renewal, and precision scales and chemical products.
Javier was admitted to the hospital in critical condition. Despite the savage attack, he managed to survive. He was charged with drug trafficking.
It was the second drug-related assault he had suffered in just one month. On the first occasion, the thieves attacked his home and managed to take all the merchandise. On the night of the events, the drug-robbers wanted to steal another plantation Javier had in the building opposite, also his property, but the man surprised them.
It didn’t take the Mossos long to identify the perpetrators. Several security cameras captured the license plates of the vehicles they used to go to Riudarenes and allowed their movements to be reconstructed.
The gang had been living off drug-related robberies for years. They located marijuana plantations, watched their owners for days, and when the harvest was ready, they would break in armed to take all the merchandise. Then they would resell it to traffickers. They had even found a market inside the Quatre Camins prison, where an accomplice introduced the drugs to sell among inmates. The business was lucrative: they cultivated nothing, and everything they sold was profit.
It was not the first time they had acted against Javier. The assault he had suffered just a month earlier also bore their signature.
Investigators also linked them to another raid committed in 2019 in Sant Cebrià de Vallalta. The victim was a Serbian citizen who also concealed a marijuana plantation and was brutally assaulted. The gang was dismantled a few weeks later.
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