Kirsty Mckenzie
A SECOND expat has been arrested in a sleepy Spanish resort accused of sick crimes against children in the last year.
The unnamed Belgian drifter was the fourth man to be detained by police for child sex crimes in and around Torre del Mar since December.
He was living out of his car in a bid to stay under the radar of authorities after escaping from a mental institution where he had been sent for sexually assaulting two girls aged 11 and 12.
On July 30 last year the pervert, who also has a conviction for sexually assaulting a woman, escaped from the Ankerstraat General Psychiatric Hospital in Belgium.
The suspect, who is described as of ‘great importance to the Belgian Prosecutor’s Office’, was caught after a police surveillance unit spotted him.
Cops stormed the Belgian pervert’s car between Torre del Mar and nearby Velez-Malaga after staking out his regular pit stops, including a petrol station, restaurant and former partner.
In December last year a 77-year-old British man was arrested for allegedly sharing sexually explicit images and videos of minors on several social media sites.
Just two months later in February, 1.3 million child porn images were seized from the home of a 50-year-old Spanish man, also living in Velez-Malaga.
Meanwhile, in November 2019 a Spanish teacher was arrested charged with sexual abuse of children in Velez Malaga, while a primary school teacher was arrested in 2017 accused of assaulting three children aged between 10 and 11.
Local expats have called the spate of arrests ‘deeply disturbing’ for a town with just 20,000 inhabitants.
One father-of-two told the Olive Press: “They are not welcome here. Torre del Mar is a very open-minded and diverse place but paedophiles are the lowest of the low.
“They should be castrated and we should be sending them back to their countries.”
In 2012 Welshman Robert Edward Bill fled the town after attempting to abduct a 12-year-old girl. He was later jailed for 20 years in Morocco for two more attempted abductions.
