AN 81-year-old landlord in Spain allegedly shot his tenant in the head because he owed him two months’ rent.
Incredibly, the 31-year-old father-of-two survived after the bullet became lodged in the back of his skull.
The shocking events took place on February 24 in San Jose de la Rinconada, a small district in the northernmost part of Sevilla city.
The victim, who asked to remain anonymous, recalled his ordeal to regional newspaper Diario de Sevilla.
He told journalist Fernando Avila how surgeons painstakingly removed the bullet from his skull at the Virgen Macarena Hospital, in the centre of the historic capital.
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The octogenarian attacker, a retired gravedigger, was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. He was released on bail when he appeared before the court – a fact the victim ‘can not understand’, insisting he ‘should be held in prison before trial’.
The victim, identified only as A.E, said he owed the man around €1,000 for two months of missed rent, and that they had argued about it in the run up to the shooting.
Some 20 days before the alleged attempted murder, A.E said his landlord asked him to move some paint cans in the attic, before he suddenly saw him reach for his gun.
He said: ‘This man is always armed. He used to brag in bars about having a small pistol and wearing it on his chest. I noticed he was acting very strange in the attic. I went to get one of the cans, and when I turned around, I saw him reaching for the gun.
‘I mentioned this to my wife, who didn’t know if he was trying to shoot me or something, but we couldn’t believe he would do that, and so continued living there.’
However, almost three weeks later, he visited his landlord in offices that make up the ground floor of the building, and asked to use his phone to call his mother, as his had run out of battery.
He recalled: ‘He told me to go into a room there to talk in peace. I was talking to my mother, and when I hung up, I heard a ‘boom,’ a very loud buzzing sound in my head.
‘I was sitting in the chair and fell forward. I felt a loud buzzing sound, very cold in my head, and a blow to my back. To regain balance, I threw my hands back. He was coming to shoot me again. I fell, and luckily I grabbed his hand that was holding the gun. There was a struggle between them, he fell, and somehow I took the gun from him and ran away.’
The shooting occurred on Calle Virgen de los Dolores at around 6.40pm on February 24.
Incredibly, A.E managed to walk 380m to the nearest medical clinic, all the while bleeding profusely from his head and still holding his attacker’s gun.
He was immediately transferred to hospital, where he received life-saving surgery. A.E said the bullet split his skull and ‘definitely could have killed me.’
He said he could not believe that the landlord was released on bail.
He fumed: ‘The most logical thing would be for him to be in pretrial detention awaiting trial. I don’t know if he can come looking for me. There was no argument or anything that day, and there was no reason for him to do what he did.’
A.E said he ‘hopes justice is done’ and that the landlord ‘serves a sentence for what he did, which was attempting to kill in cold blood.’
