A FATHER from Lorca (Murcia) stabbed his 11-year-old daughter's rapist in the early hours of Wednesday morning and left him fighting for his life in hospital, National Police inform.
Officers heard that the child's parents, both Ecuadorian, had left the house for work on Tuesday half an hour before their daughter was due to set off for school and that the accused, of the same nationality (pictured here being taken away by police), had taken advantage of their absence to gain entry to the family home.
He claimed he was a family friend and had been sent round to look after the schoolgirl while her parents were at work and until she set off for school.
The 36-year-old man then raped her and left the property.
He returned the same time – around 08.00hrs – the next morning, believing the parents to be out of the house and with the intention of repeating the attack, but the mother and father were at home and had been told by their daughter what had happened.
The girl's father stabbed him in a fit of rage.
Whilst the rapist is being treated in hospital, National Police are investigating the incident, but the 11-year-old's father has not been arrested as yet.
When the news broke, another girl, aged nine, recognised the same rapist from a photo supplied by the police as the man who had also sexually assaulted her in November, also in Lorca.
She said the accused had approached her near the school gates, claiming to be a friend of one of her teachers, and had taken her to a park nearby.
The nine-year-old, also Ecuadorian, was attacked, but she managed to wriggle free before the man could rape her and ran away shouting for help.
Another 'parental revenge' case sees fresh appeal launched
Whilst it is not known what the latest victim's father's fate will be, another high-profile case of a parent attacking a child rapist has hit the headlines again.
María del Carmen García, whose daughter Verónica was raped at knifepoint aged 13 back in 1998, has been suffering severe depression ever since and, when the attacker was let out for a weekend in 2005, she murdered him after he provoked her.
The rapist had been deliberately hanging around the bar and bus stop in Benejúzar (Alicante province) which he knew the family used daily, and smiled mockingly at María del Carmen, asking if she remembered him.
The mother went home, fetched a vat of petrol, threw it over him and set him alight, and he died later in hospital.
She was then found wandering the streets in a dazed and distressed state.
After serving a year in prison, she was provisionally released while her solicitor fought for her to be freed on the grounds of having been mentally-ill at the time of the killing, and of her staying in prison being potentially extremely harmful to her in her depressed state.
Numerous petitions were set up online and top legal authorities called for her to be given an official pardon, but their pleas fell on deaf ears and she was forced to return to jail to serve a five-year sentence.
Now, a year on, her solicitor has launched a fresh appeal to the new minister of justice, Rafael Catalá, in which he also refers to the mass public support María del Carmen has received.
