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Date Published: 13/09/2021
ARCHIVED - Property rental nightmare la Manga: dead body, drug plantation, disappearance of paying tenant
The Madrid-based owner of the property found more than he bargained for when querying a high electricity bill
The Madrid-based owner of a villa in La Manga del Mar Menor found a bit more than he had bargained for when attempting to contact a rentee to query a 300-euro electricity bill.
The villa, a three-storey building located at kilometre 18 of La Manga, near to Veneziola and Las Encañizadas, had been rented out in May to a Lithuanian female for a year, with the option to buy the property at the end of the tenancy.
However, by the end of the summer, the landlord was becoming anxious that the tenant was failing to respond to any of his calls to check whether everything was OK and to discuss the 300 euro electicity bill he had received and which had not been paid, a bill he deemed to be excessive.
Perturbed by her silence and the lack of response to his calls and messages, he drove down from Madrid to check on his property, and to his horror, discovered that not only had his tenants fled, but had left behind a decomposing body in the second bedroom and clear evidence that the house was being used as a marijuana greenhouse.
The body found in the second floor bedroom was lying next to a quantity of broken glass according to sources close to the landlord, although the Judicial Police who carried out a detailed inspection of the property, photographed the condition in which the house had been left and removed the body, have given little in the way of concrete information about the crime, as the investigation is open and various leads are being followed up to clarify the situation.
A forensic doctor from the Cartagena Institute of Legal Medicine and the judge on duty from San Javier also viewed the property before the body was removed.
The house was very obviously being used to cultivate marijuana, hence the high electricity bill, and it appears that more than one crop had matured during the rental period.
The property had also obviously been abandoned by its occupants in a hurry, as no effort had been made to remove traces of the operations and neighbours report having seen a high-end vehicle during the period of occupancy.
The fact that the property had been abandoned in haste has raised question about whether this was due to the death of the deceased, also believed to be of Lithuanian origin, and whether the death was linked to the drug cultivation activity being undertaken inside the property.
And then, the landlord can start thinking about cleaning up his property and finding another tenant…
Image: Archive. Guardia Civíl
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