When it was a few minutes before nine at night, Genesis and her husband, a couple from Texas who were staying in the Acta Atrium of Barcelona’s Eixample to enjoy the Spring Sound, chatted with their friends, who were staying at the same hotel, because it was time to go to the festival. But they began to hear screams “of pain” of a man who claimed out loud that he was kidnapped and that I needed one ambulance. Genesis understands Spanish but he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
A few minutes later, those cries of despair from the man who said he had been kidnapped, gave way to slamming doors and stressed footsteps from the Mossos d’Esquadra qthey had just arrived at Atrium Minutesalerted by the hotel itself.
Four Mossos patrols, two local and two citizen security, were the first to respond to the aid launched by the hotel. The eight agents entered the building, located in the central Gran Via de Les Corts Catalanes, and ran into one of the armed kidnappers. They were able to reduce it. And soon after, they found the man they had kidnapped gagged in one of the rooms. According to the agents, two other kidnappers were missing, who could still be in the hotel, hidden in one of the rooms, perhaps. The rest of the reinforcements and the riot police arrived. Mobile Brigade (Brimo) to take control of the hotel. Begin a thorough search, room by room. The orders that the police gave loudly is that everyone should stay in their cameras. The problem was that for Génesis and her husband those orders reached far away and were confused with the kidnapped’s cries for help. As citizens of USAbelieved that they could be experiencing a massacre like the ones that have been in the news in their country recently.
waiting for the police
“We have passed a lot of panic“, Genesis said with a broken voice when leaving the hotel. “Our friends have told us by WhatsApp that we had to stay locked up, that the policemen would go through our room to check if everything was okay,” he recalled around 11:00 p.m., when the nightmare was over.
La Génesis, an American tourist who visited the Atrium hotel in Barcelona during the segress and subsequent operations of the @mossos, explains that they have passed molta porquè sentien crits i agents have entered amb fusells looking for segrestadors. Via @the newspaper pic.twitter.com/E8ukQyizKT
– Guillem Sánchez (@guillem_sm) June 9, 2022
As much nerves as the couple had while waiting for the police to enter, they also had the nerve to take out their mobile phone and record the arrival of the agents. This, as seen in the images that have been given to EL PERIÓDICO, happens to gun point because the police do not know if in Genesis’s room -or in any other- they can meet face to face with one of the two kidnappers, possibly armed, they are looking for.
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When they realize that there is no kidnapper in that chamber either, the Mossos recognize Genesis and her husband as clients, ask them to identify themselves, to stay in a corner while they search the room and to wait locked up. Permission to go outside has arrived an hour later.
open investigation
The Mossos, after searching the entire hotel, have dismantled the operation and have left the case in the hands of the Security and Extortion Unit of the Criminal Investigation Division. They will be the ones who from now on try to clarify why they kidnapped this man – who has not been injured – and where the two missing in the equation have gone.