A COSTA del Sol hitman has revealed how he gets paid up to €60,000 for each person he kills.
The French-Moroccan, who grew up in Marseilles, detailed his profession in an exclusive sit down with Spanish national El Espanol.
Referred to as Jamal, the masked killer worked his way up the criminal ladder in his French hometown before making the leap into international crime.
He told the paper how he moves around Europe to carry out hits but focuses on southern Spain.
“Yes, I have been a hitman for a few years, I don’t know, about 10 or so, I don’t remember the year of my first murder,” he said.
“But in this world I do a bit of everything: I move drugs from here to there, I deliver money, spy for other gangs … My current boss – who hasn’t even revealed his nationality – pays me to do all kinds of work, not just to put some bullets in a guy’s chest.”
The meeting came less than 48 hours after a Frenchman was shot to death in a carpark in Cabopino, Marbella.
He was the sixth victim of mafia violence in the final quarter of 2019, and came before a fresh body was discovered in Mijas yesterday, surrounded by bullet casings.
This year has been the bloodiest in a decade, with last year being the second-bloodiest.
“This is the wild west,” a police officer told El Espanol.
The Costa del Sol police have been battling a drugs war for more than a decade in a region which, relatively speaking, has one of the highest number of drug related crimes considering it is only home to 530,000 people.
“It is working very well and our effort pays off,” continued the agent, “but there are gangs everywhere.
“It is like a pipe that bursts: although we put plugs in, the water overflows.
“Together with Miami, where Colombians do a lot of harm and have been established for decades, Marbella has become another epicentre of organised crime in the world. No doubt.
“If we measure it by its population, in nowhere else are there so many criminals and as many structured gangs as here.
“The worst of the whole world has been installed and the rich people of before are leaving: now there are Russian, Indian, Dutch, Colombian, Moroccan, English, Irish, Swedish gangsters … Even Chinese are already beginning to appear in our investigations, something unthinkable until recently. ”
The last seven deaths have made 2019 officially Malaga’s bloodiest year of the last decade, with 24 violent deaths.
‘Jamal’ went on to detail how much he is paid for each hit.
“Each death usually costs between €15,000 and €60,000,” he explained.
“It depends on several factors: the type of victim, the difficulty … It’s complicated to talk about a standard rate.”
He added that he never works alone and that he lives each day in fear.
“You assume that any day they can kill you…you never lose the fear of dying.
“A rival organisation could kill me, colleagues who want my position, members of my gang with whom I do not get along, people to whom I owe money … anyone could kill me or have me killed.
“Every day (I think about leaving). But I don’t know if I really want to quit.
“The first death hurts. The following less so and little by little they hurt less.
“But it is something that I think about often and it never leaves my mind.”
Jamal is just a tiny cog in a huge mafia machine that operates along the Costa.
There are now more than 200 gangs in the area, mostly focusing on drug trafficking for income – although prostituting women, selling weapons and money laundering are also lucrative avenues.
But in this tourist mecca, where foreign criminals can blend in seamlessly with international tourists, violence is only increasing.
Police have become accustomed to seeing dead bodies with faces ‘painted like a clown’ and finding vests weighted down with weights, perfect for dumping bodies in the sea.
“We are facing real crime professionals, hitmen who move all over Europe killing whoever they indicate,” the UDYCO chief in Malaga said.
On many occasions, he added, hired assassins make trips of four or five days, plan the attack, execute it and leave.
On November 15, 2019, in the Andasol urbanization of Marbella, two gunmen shot and killed Moroccan Abdelkader El Hichou El Maya and seriously injured his associate.
According to sources in the Costa del Sol underworld, he was sitting on €360,000 cash.
The working theory is that someone close to him knew about the stash and orchestrated the hit to steal the money.
Six days later, on November 21, Briton Peter Andrew Williamson was shot to death in his car in Mijas.
According to El Espanol, he was a member of a Manchester gang called ‘Anti A Team’, the long term rivals of another gang, dubbed the ‘A Team’.
The war between the two has resulted in several deaths in Manchester, including innocent victims.
Some of the members of both clans are based on the Costa del Sol. Williamson, 39, was one of them.