The father who killed his son in a hotel in Barcelona is found dead in El Prat

BarcelonaThe father who killed his two-year-old son at the Hotel Concordia in Barcelona on 24 August committed suicide near El Prat airport. The Mossos d'Esquadra have found his body this Wednesday at noon in a wooded area and it has already been confirmed that it is Martin Ezequiel Álvarez Giaccio, the 44-year-old man they were looking for. As reported by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC), the body is "fully identified". The judge on duty at El Prat has made the lifting of the body this afternoon, a few hours after the police had located the body. The Mossos worked with the hypothesis that Alvarez could be dead and finally found him next to the airport, on land owned by Aena. The man had hung himself and had no documentation on him.

Investigators had lost track of Álvarez at El Prat airport, where he had arrived in a taxi after fleeing the hotel in Barcelona. But they found he had not taken a plane. After the three weeks missing, during which he had not activated his mobile phone or made any money movements, and the Mossos found his passport in one of the houses they searched when they were looking for Álvarez. This, coupled with the passing of the days without hearing from the man, raised the question on whether Álvarez had really planned the escape after the murder. Another fact that raised suspicions that the man was dead was that the police had published his image in an attempt to find him and none of the warnings received had been of any use. In short, no one had seen him from the airport onwards.

Search in several places

That is why the Mossos had focused their efforts around El Prat in recent days: they thought that Álvarez had not been able to travel much further. Previously, the police had also searched for him in other means of transport, in El Vendrell - where he now lived -, in the homes of other relatives or friends and in Montjuïc, which was the first place to search because it was believed that he could be hiding there. The reason is that the hotel in Barcelona where he murdered the boy is located in the Paral-lel, in the Poble-sec neighbourhood: he had escaped by jumping the fence of the swimming pool. As in the hours after the crime investigators had difficulty locating Álvarez and tracing the route he had followed, they released a photo of him. It is an unusual action by the Mossos; in fact, the last call they made to find someone was in August 2017 when they were looking for the driver of the van of the attack on La Rambla.

The man killed the child to take revenge on the mother because they were separating. In this form of gender-based violence, vicarious violence, the aggressor uses the children to hurt the partner. Before disappearing, Álvarez sent the woman the following messages: "You'll regret it" and "I'll leave you at the hotel what you deserve". She immediately feared for the child and called the police, who upon arriving at the hotel room located the child with obvious signs of asphyxiation and began the investigation. Prior to the murder, there was no record of a history of domestic violence against Álvarez.