Letters pile up in prisoner’s former home in Biar CIVIL GUARD (Europa Press)
Every morning, a man employed by the Alicante Post Office for a year left his home in Biar, a municipality in the north of the province, near Villena. He registered at the office, picked up the sack from the assigned area in the capital and distributed only those packages that corresponded to him. At the end of his working day, he returned to his home in Biar, where he collected the remaining mailings, ie official correspondence, private letters and mail pick-up notices. This was the case for a year between 2012 and 2013, after which his contract was not renewed because Correos found irregularities in his service. A decade later, the mountain of more than 20,000 documents was discovered in his home, which he had just sold. The temporary postman, now 62, was arrested last Wednesday by the Civil Guard accused of a crime of breach of trust in the safekeeping of documents.
One of the Post’s sales managers was the one who alerted the Villena Civil Guard, who are in charge of the investigation. As reported in his complaint, a developer warned him that he had “found a large number of closed letters” in a plot of land he had bought and was remodeling in Biar, according to the armed institute. Apparently, sources close to the investigation add, the arrested person lived with her recently deceased father in this house in Biar. He sold the property but didn’t bother to empty it of its contents. And the person in charge of the reform found “a multitude of full garbage bags scattered throughout the house,” they say.
official quotes
The superintendent asked the detainee to vacate the house, but he didn’t pay attention, the same sources said. Finally she decided to open one of the bags and was surprised to see so many sealed envelopes. A whole year of private correspondence, official notices, yellow papers notifying packages not delivered were hidden in dozens of garbage bags in an old house 50 kilometers from its recipients. “There was no package,” the sources consulted explain, “because they are subject to more extensive registration and monitoring by the post office.” The builder informed the prosecutor’s office, who, together with the investigating officers, classified the letters in their company boxes until the building’s entrance hall was full.
Investigators reviewed the correspondence and consulted “property information databases,” reports the Civil Guard, and all evidence pointed to a single suspect. It was “a former employee of the post office who, in 2012 and 2013, had performed the functions of delivery assistant in an area of the municipality of Alicante and who was also resident at that address on the same dates,” they explain. On June 1, they arrested the temporary postman in Biar, who was handed over to a court in Villena, which ordered protective measures for the detainee. “The postal documents found” were “temporarily deposited in post offices” pending the judge’s determination that they can be delivered to their recipients more than a decade later.
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