Entrance to the Madrid 2 Penitentiary Center, located between the Madrid municipalities of Alcalá de Henares and Meco, in a file image.
The Civil Guard has been searching since Saturday afternoon for Yusef M. L., alias El Pastilla and 20 years old, after having escaped that day from the Alcalá-Meco Penitentiary Center (Madrid), where he was being held awaiting trial for his alleged involvement in two contract killings. The escape was detected shortly after 17:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve during the count of inmates that is carried out after the end of family visits, according to El Faro de Ceuta and confirmed by EL PAÍS in several prison sources. These sources point out that El Pastilla, who that day had had a vis-à-vis communication (with physical contact) with relatives, took advantage of a security breach to mix with the visitors and escape by walking through the main door of the center.
Sources close to the investigation conclude that the escape was not prepared and that all indications point to the fact that he did not have the help of prison workers either. In this regard, they point out that Yusef M. had been in the centre for less than three weeks and, therefore, had neither the capacity nor the time to organise it, in addition to the fact that this Saturday's visit was the first vis a vis that he enjoyed with family members in the Alcalá-Meco prison and, therefore, he did not know under what circumstances it took place in this prison. "He saw the opportunity and took it," these sources are convinced. A review of the images recorded by the security cameras of the penitentiary center points in the same direction. In them, it is seen how the inmate left the center walking calmly accompanied by his relatives. Prison sources describe what happened as a "very serious" security failure and attribute it to "an accumulation of errors". The Penitentiary Institutions have initiated an internal procedure to determine the circumstances of the facts.
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Yusef M. was in pre-trial detention as the alleged perpetrator of at least two murders. The first was on October 6, 2022, when he allegedly killed on behalf in Algeciras (Cádiz) a worker at the port of this town whom the gang in which he was then a member, that of Nayim K. A., alias Tayena, mistook for a member of a rival group, the 'Piolín'. The second homicide of which he is accused was committed on April 12 of this year and was that of Tayena himself, whom he allegedly shot almost at point-blank range in the abdomen as he left his home in Los Cortijillos, in Los Barrios, also in the province of Cadiz. Yusef was captured that same afternoon in Algeciras when he tried to board the ferry bound for Ceuta to hide. The police also implicated him in numerous shootouts carried out by mafias to take control of drug trafficking on the outskirts of this autonomous city.
After his incarceration, Yusef was included in the File of Special Monitoring Inmates (FIES), a system created more than 25 years ago to increase control over certain prisoners and, in this way, "guarantee security" inside prisons. Specifically, it was catalogued as FIES-5, one of the five files that exist and which is intended for what are called prisoners with "special characteristics", including those accused of crimes with links to organized crime or of special gravity, as was his case. Since then, he had been in the Botafuegos prison in Algeciras, from where he was transferred at the beginning of December due to the risk that he would be attacked by inmates linked to the group of the second of his victims. The destination was the Madrid prison, a reference center for inmates under 21 years of age.
From 2005 until now, there have been more than 10,000 violations of sentences in Spanish prisons (more than 500 per year, on average), according to data from the Ministry of the Interior; although most of the escapees are apprehended soon after. Of this figure, the highest number occurred when prisoners took advantage of a leave of absence from returning to the penitentiary. Another significant number of violations occur during outings to go to court, when they are admitted to hospitals or when carrying out a cultural activity outside prison. On April 26, two inmates of the Aranjuez prison took advantage of one of the latter to the Palace of this town and eat in a restaurant, to escape.
Escapes from inside prison, such as the one now carried out by Yusef M., are far fewer: since 2005 there have been fewer than thirty, according to different parliamentary responses from the Interior Ministry in recent years. One of the most famous was the one that starred, in December 2020, Jonathan Moñiz, El Piojo, and his brother Miguel Ángel, who escaped from Valdemoro prison after breaking the bars of a window, walking through the rooftops of the center and jumping the perimeter fence with a rope made by them. A third inmate who accompanied them failed in the attempt. The Moñiz brothers were arrested months later separately. Days after that escape, the Interior Ministry instructed the directors of all prisons to review the security systems and urge the implementation of the measures contemplated in the protocols to prevent escapes.