SIX men have been sentenced for kidnapping and torturing a young Dutch man in a Fuengirola forest after he arrived on a flight from the UK.
The Audiencia Provincial de Malaga, the regional court that handles Malaga province’s most serious criminal trials, handed down sentences of up to nine and a half years after all six admitted guilt in a plea deal with prosecutors.
According to the ruling seen by Spanish newspaper SUR, the grim tale began on the morning of May 10, 2023.
The victim, a Dutch man in his mid-twenties, had what the ruling calls ‘a score to settle’ with his captors from outside Spain, and was lured to Malaga on a flight from Birmingham believing it was an ordinary trip.
He landed at 11am, accompanied by one of the men who would go on to hold him captive.
A second man was waiting at the airport to drive them both to a house in Fuengirola, on the Costa del Sol, where the rest of the group had gathered.
They shared drinks and made small talk, then one of the men struck him from behind while another tied his hands and feet.
The beating that followed left so much blood in the house that the attackers had to stop and clean it up, according to the ruling.
Two of the men then left.
That night, around 10pm, the rest stripped him of his clothes, documents and an Apple Watch worth €1,420, hooded him, gagged him with duct tape and drove him in the boot of a car to woodland off Calle Los Lirios, on Fuengirola’s edge.
There, they slashed him with knives and crushed his fingers with pliers to, in the ruling’s own words, ‘obtain answers to a series of questions they wanted resolved’.
But he gave them nothing, according to the court documents.
They abandoned him in the undergrowth, where a passer-by found him and alerted the Policia Local.
The attack traces back to a cocaine-trafficking network spanning the Netherlands and Malaga province, according to a Policia Nacional statement issued when the gang was arrested in December 2023.
Officers said the victim, who had worked for the same network, was suspected of colluding in the theft of a drug shipment, and was pursued over a debt of more than €3 million.
Before the Fuengirola attack, he had been coerced into travelling to the UK for a polygraph test over the theft, which came back inconclusive — the reason, police said, he was brought to the Costa del Sol to meet the gang’s leader in person.
Officers arrested the leader and an associate in Marbella, with three more held in the Netherlands and one in France by the end of November 2023. Five of the six are Dutch nationals; the sixth is British.
The victim needed 278 days to recover, 35 of them in hospital, treated in both Spain and the Netherlands.
Forensic assessors put his lasting injuries at 19 points on the scale Spanish courts use to calculate compensation for permanent harm.
Three of the men were sentenced to nine and a half years each, for unlawful detention, organised crime membership, causing injury and robbery with violence, and must also pay the victim €14,720 in compensation between them.
The other three received four years each for unlawful detention and organised crime membership, though the court suspended two of those sentences on condition the men stay out of trouble and pay a €2,400 fine.
All six are barred from going within 500 metres of the victim, or contacting him, for five years.
Four of the six will also be deported once they have served half their sentence, with a six-year ban on returning to Spain.
One has already spent enough time in pretrial custody to meet that threshold, so his removal is expected imminently.
Two more people who were in the house during the first attack have never been identified, and were never charged.
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