In the picture young people in front of the nightclubs on the promenade of Barcelona in September 2021. Albert Garcia
Friday at five in the morning. Eva was with her friends on the terrace of the Cocoa Mataró nightclub when she suddenly felt a stitch in her left leg. He went to the bathroom and found that he had the needle’s mark on it. He recognized her because he had seen such wounds on social networks for days. “I got very nervous and dizzy. I cried and told a security guard what had happened to me and he didn’t believe me,” says the 18-year-old. A sudden spate of glitches among women in entertainment venues has raised alarms and keeps young women on the alert. With Catalonia at the top with 23 complaints, the phenomenon has spread throughout Spain, with a dozen complaints in the Basque Country, followed by Andalusia and other communities such as Castile-La Mancha, Asturias, Cantabria and the Balearic Islands. Only in one case were traces of liquid ecstasy detected in the analyzes of a child under the age of 13. The police do not know the intentions of the perpetrators, and without sexual assault or robbery, no arrested person turns up.
The phenomenon of flat tires among women (in Catalonia, only one of the 23 victims is a man) in nightlife has reached Spain after a European tour. It was spotted months ago in clubs in Belgium, France, the UK and Ireland. The UK Parliament even carried out an April report analyzing the wave of flat tire complaints, mostly women, last autumn, with 1,382 cases between September 2021 and January 2022 in nightlife and parties. In France, more than 800 complaints had been filed as of June 16, according to the General Directorate of the National Police (DGPN). In Spain, the police suspect that they are confronted with the same phenomenon: random punctures without traces of toxins in the blood or specific reasons, or previously detained people who no longer commit crimes.
Andrea (free name) is 22 years old and comes from Cadiz. On Saturday, she decided to party with her best friend in the town of El Puerto de Santa María, in Cadiz, as she usually does, but this time it was different. “I asked my boyfriend to come to the bathroom with me, we always go together. As we walked through the crowd, she grabbed my arm and yelled at me that she had been pushed. I didn’t know how to react, I couldn’t believe it,” the young woman recalls. “She saw that the boy who stabbed her was dressed in black and had a syringe in his hand,” she says. Andrea pulled her friend away from the crowd, they told the waiters and they closed the shop. Four police vans soon arrived with an ambulance, and as the medical teams were already treating her friend, another girl arrived crying because she too had been stung. In Andalusia, the National Police has more than a dozen complaints on its table, seven from Cadiz, three from Cordoba and another from Malaga.
Women who have been victims of needle sticks often report similar episodes characterized by dizziness and vomiting. Eva, who suffered the puncture in a discotheque in Mataró, did not hesitate to go to the Can Ruti Hospital in Badalona. “They did tests, urine tests and watched me until I got better and they released me. The same day at night I threw up and they took me back, ”explains the young woman who tested negative in everything. Eva knows other girls who suffered a puncture on the same day. The government of Catalonia has put in place a protocol urging women who suspect they have been punctured to notify the venue and go to a health center immediately, always accompanied. There they perform blood and urine tests to detect drugs. It is also considering activating the protocol for possible exposure to HIV and, if it were, sexual assault, although to date it has not done so.
The President of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, has expressed his concern about the increase in breakdowns and has urged citizens, in the face of attacks that cause “fear and insecurity”, to “be on the alert, report them and close the perpetrators”. isolate”. . “It’s not a question of women when they party, it challenges us all,” insisted the Catalan president, who described the practice as “absolutely despicable”. Catalan Minister for Equality and Feminism, Tània Verge, has already announced that nightclubs are considering registering men before entering their premises. But until these and other measures are approved, the adviser has insisted on staying calm and following the protocol of action he formulated.
“You can never imagine what will happen to you. No one around you either,” confesses Andrea, whose boyfriend suffered the puncture in Cádiz. She only had a little fever and was unwell, but she affirms that the other girl collapsed as soon as she received the puncture. In the emergency room, they couldn’t tell them what they injected. They didn’t know if it was a new drug and were told they could probably tell after a few hours of repeated testing. “I’m very scared. When I went to the beach the next day, I looked at everyone because I was afraid they would sting me,” he laments.
In Catalonia, the Mossos d’Esquadra continue to investigate on a case-by-case basis, checking surveillance cameras and trying to find the perpetrators. They do not rule out that they are tourists from France, where punctures have caused a stir in recent months. Most of the twenty complaints are clustered in the same town, Lloret de Mar, in Girona. “Maybe they’re doing it for fun,” complained police circles in the face of a phenomenon that torments women and researchers for fear it could get worse. To the point that a young woman has gone to the hospital, believing she may have been the victim of a flat tire, but after being examined, doctors have ruled it out, police sources say.