Alex Trelinski
AN ALICANTE hotel worker has been caught stealing money from room safes by using a universal access code to open them.
The 24-year-old Spanish woman- who was the hotel housekeeper- has been arrested by the Policia Nacional after two guests at the city centre hotel reported they had money taken.
Both clients said they deposited cash in their room safes and locked the safes and room doors when they went out.
Hours later when they returned and opened the safes, they noticed the money had gone.
Police eliminated any outsider from being responsible after confirming the room doors had not been forced, which meant it was an ‘inside job’.
The only person who had full access to the rooms via a master key and who knew the safe codes was the housekeeper, who was detained and charged with two counts of robbery.
It’s the second criminal case involving a Costa Blanca hotel employee to surface this week, after a Benidorm hotel receptionist was arrested for stealing €10,123 from a safe and creating a fake alibi to try to outwit the Policia Nacional.
The hotel manager reported the theft but the 37-year-old Spanish night shift employee- who was the main suspect- said he wasn’t there at the time of crime because he left the area to take a phone call.
That call allegedly came from somebody across the street who said they saw a hotel guest trapped on a fourth-floor balcony.
He went to check out the ‘incident’ but saw nothing.
Shortly after leaving to take the ‘call’, security cameras showed a man dressed in black with a hood coming down the internal stairs and he went straight to the safe and immediately opened it.
All the money was removed and he exited up the same internal stairs- the top of which are a blind spot for security cameras.
Three minutes later he ‘returned’ as the receptionist and at the shift handover, he told a colleague that it had been a quiet night except for the phone call he received.
The morning shift receptionist discovered that the safe was robbed and reported it to her boss.
Despite the disguise, the hotel manager told the police that the thief had the same height and moved exactly like the night-shift employee, who was arrested for misappropriation.
