Six members of a family sleep in prison for the murder of an evangelical pastor who was sentenced to death and executed in broad daylight.
On March 16, 2022, Joaquín Jiménez Silva was hit by another vehicle when he was driving through a roundabout in the Madrid district of San Blas and executed with at least four shots fired at him by a man who got out of a third car and was left behind. bleeding out on the seat.
From that point, the diaspora of the six alleged attackers of the Vargas family, a well-known gypsy clan from Madrid, began to evade justice in various parts of Spain.
A flight that came to an end at the end of last year, when the last of the six people accused of participating in the crime was arrested, a woman who had gone to live in Mallorca.
A few days before the murder, the 47-year-old victim had had an argument with several of the Vargas over a family matter.
In the meeting, in which the tone was rising and the atmosphere heating up, even death threats were made, to which Joaquín ignored.
“It seems that the victim, in his capacity as a pastor, tried to mediate between the families of a marriage in which the woman wanted to separate.
But something did not go well and they decided to go after him.
It was a real planned ambush ”, explain police sources.
One after one, the investigators of Group V of homicides of the Superior Police Headquarters of Madrid have listened to the story of all the relatives of both clans to try to unravel some quarrels that, according to the codes of these families, were the reason for death sentence.
"We have not come to understand what was the exact reason that caused this reaction, but the facts are that several members of this family got together that day and decided to kill him," the same police sources indicate.
The Samur toilets, who happened to be treating a slightly injured person from a traffic accident a few meters away, could not do anything to save his life.
Just a few hours later, a member of the attacking clan turned himself in in Seville.
It was the first piece to fall after a frantic drive to a city located 400 kilometers from the scene of the crime.
It seems that, at first, he tried to seek refuge in the Andalusian city, but his final decision was to turn himself in and face the law of the courts and not that of the street.
Two weeks later, the father of this first detainee went to the police to also confess to his participation in the events and take responsibility for holding the weapon.
But the rest of the alleged attackers chose to hide and finding them has required a huge effort to locate and track them.
about to embark
On May 6, another member of the Vargas clan was intercepted in the port of Valencia, when he was about to embark for Palma de Mallorca.
Investigators consider him the material author of the shots.
He is a direct relative of the husband whose separation gave rise to the conflict.
In September, a new member of the family was added to the list of those arrested, who had settled in A Coruña for months.
The final rapier came in October and November.
The penultimate of those allegedly involved was arrested at the Madrid Barajas airport and, finally, a woman who had moved to Mallorca fell.
This time, Joaquín Jiménez played the role of fatality, but just 20 years before his murder, he was part of the executing party.
The deceased came to be convicted of the murder of two members of the Los Gallegos clan in the disappeared shanty town of Las Mimbreras in Madrid.
Carlos Estero Suárez, 43, and his son-in-law, Jaime Barrull, 22, were killed among the more than 80 shots fired one night in May 2002 in the settlement.
The reason was then a territorial problem: the head of Los Gallegos had prevented the Jiménez Silva from buying a house in the town due to the doubt that they would use it to sell drugs.
Pastor Joaquín was acquitted of this murder due to lack of evidence.
The investigators sniffed in every possible corner to put a face and name to the six occupants of the two vehicles that that day cornered and put an end to the life of the pastor, a man who tried to mediate, but only agitated the members to unexpected extremes. of a family that did not accept a separation in its ranks.
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