Police in northern Spain began questioning the entire population of a tiny mountain village on Tuesday after the mayor was shot dead in an ambush on a country road.
All 37 inhabitants of Fago, in the Pyrenees near France, are suspects in a crime which police believe involved several of the many villagers who had argued with the mayor, Miguel Grima.
Grima was shot on Friday evening after rocks were thrown across a road leading into the village, forcing him to stop or slow his car.
His body, peppered with shotgun pellets, was discovered in a gully beside the road the following day while his battered Mercedes was found abandoned down a forest track about about 13km away. Police believe several people, possibly local huntsmen whom Grima had been fighting through the local courts, took part in the murder. Spanish news media were gripped by the killing as rumours of longstanding feuds among the villagers began to emerge.
”No one in the village is wicked enough to do anything like this,” one resident, who asked not to be named, told the news agency EFE while police went around collecting shotguns.
But the mayor had a long list of enemies, including local builders to whom he had refused licences. There were also a number of people who had been prevented from registering as voters. He had also received threats. ”These were made repeatedly over a period of time,” said Antonio Torres, a local official for Grima’s People’s party.
One resident found rocks scattered across the road, and moved them when he returned home on Friday night. Another, who drove past the mayor’s Mercedes as it was stopped by the roadside at the same spot, said he was waved on by a man carrying a flashlight — almost certainly one of the murderers.
The village has only 22 registered voters, 17 of whom gave Grima their support at the last elections. But the mayor had reportedly fought about 40 court cases in which people living in Fago, or born there, challenged his decisions.
Police reportedly believe that the plot to kill Grima was hatched over time and by several people. At least one of these would have followed him to the nearby town of Jaca, where he attended a meeting of local mayors on Friday. He would have then telephoned his accomplices when Grima set off.
They would have set the trap for him on one of the roads into the village, where cars are few and far between. ”Revenge is best eaten cold,” one anonymous neighbour told theEl PaÃÂs daily on Tuesday. Grima’s family, who buried him in a nearby cemetery on Tuesday, have remained silent about the crime.
”We feel now as though we are all suspects,” one neighbour told El Periódico newspaper. ”Grima had enemies but he had friends too.”
Neighbours suggested that Grima, who had set up a small hotel in the village, had not respected the customs of those born and bred there. ”Few people are going to cry,” one neighbour told state television TVE.
In this case, he added, he doubted that the villagers would turn up en masse for the funeral. ”I don’t think people are very sad,” he said. ”But I can’t believe his murder has anything to do with the rows in the village.” – Guardian Unlimited Â