'Deluded' captor of Bárcenas' family is 'delighted' at going to prison in Spain

According to police, the accused, 64, also recently tried to set fire to a petrol station in Cuenca, and says, “Going to prison seems a brilliant idea. In Spanish prisons, you get hot meals.”

Enrique Olivares García, who refused to testify but apparently 'talked non-stop' during his interview at the police station, is said to have a mental illness which leaves him 66 per cent disabled, and psychiatric reports fully supported this.

Although Bárcenas' wife Rosalía Iglesias, who suffered an hour tied up at gunpoint with her son Guillermo and their cleaner, said the attacker was 'not mad at all' and that the ordeal he put the family through 'was perfectly planned'.

Olivares García is said to have been arrested for the first time when he was 18, in 1967, for aggravated robbery, and later for drug-dealing, fraud and criminal damage, the most recent being in 1999 in an attempted arson attack on a service station in the province of Cuenca.

He spent 20 years living in Latin America and has been in prisons in México and Argentina, and although he claimed he had been a member of Sandinist Army in Nicaragua, investigators say this is not true and is merely one of his psychotic delusions.

Social services in the area say they treated the accused six years ago for his mental illness.

When he turned up at the Bárcenas' apartment on the C/ Príncipe de Vergara in Madrid's wealthy Salamanca district on Wednesday night, he was dressed in black with a white dog-collar, said to be 'very dirty' and smelling strongly of alcohol.

He rang the bell and claimed to be the priest from the Soto del Real jail in the capital, where Luis Bárcenas has been remanded in custody since June 27 over alleged undeclared cash-in-hand dealings and bribes involving top-flight members of the PP as well as tax evasion on his multi-million fortune.

The accused said he had come to speak to them about Bárcenas' health.

He was asked to come in and sit down in the kitchen, where he began to tell them he was very concerned about Bárcenas' medical condition – which turned out to be non-existent, as the family discovered when he tied them up with cord and duct-tape, shouting, “I'm going to kill you all!”

Olivares was carrying a revolver which was said to be a replica of an English Bulldog and fully loaded with the type of bullets which would have caused serious injuries or death to his victims if he had opened fire.

He ordered them to hand over the pen-drives Luis Bárcenas kept with copies of the 'under-the-mattress' accounts he kept, as well as the original papers, to 'prove the government was lying'.

Olivares was hoping to blackmail the government with them and get them to buy him off.

After an hour, Guillermo Bárcenas managed to free himself of his ties and, with the help of a security guard from the apartment block, succeeded in pinning down the intruder, at which point the housekeeper grabbed the gun and rushed out into the street, calling for help in a nearby café.

As luck would have it, a patrol car was passing by and they were able to arrest Olivares on site.

When questioned at the police station, Olivares is said to have spoke spontaneously to the officers and said: “You Spanish police are lovely. Here, they respect human rights, not like in South America where they treat you like a dog. I'm delighted to go to a Spanish prison, because you lead a fantastic life there, not like in American ones. Here you get hot meals, they give you decent food.”

Ironically, Olivares is now being held in the same jail as Luis Bárcenas, although in a different block.