Murder of Eva Blanco

Eva Blanco (born 17 February 1981) played tennis with her friends during the afternoon of 19 April. At night, the group stayed in a local disco until 23:30, when they prepared to return home. Blanco, who had agreed to return at midnight, was among the first to separate from the rest. A female friend accompanied her to a vacant lot some 700 meters from Blanco's home in the Valderrey residential area, before they parted ways at 23:45. Blanco intended to walk across the vacant lot as a shortcut to her home, avoiding a longer detour through the town center, but she never reached her destination. The same shortcut was used by her and other Valderrey students regularly to get to high school. By 2:30, Blanco's family, friends, Civil Guards and the local police began her search in Algete and the area leading to nearby Fuente el Saz de Jarama, Blanco's father visited the local Civil Guard station fifteen times during the night and criticized the institution for not searching the rural roads or using vehicles in the search before sunrise, except for a short 20 minutes run around Valderrey. He claimed that they did not do it earlier because they did not have the gas. The Civil Guard denied the accusation and said that it was customary to wait some hours between a missing person report and its search. ==Investigation==

Discovery of body Blanco's body was found the next day by two elderly Ajalvir residents at 9:00 AM, Autopsy report The autopsy report showed that Blanco was stabbed in the back 19 times before dying from blood loss around 4:00 AM. The murder weapon was a navaja between 8 and 10 centimetres long and 1  cm wide. 'Secret diaries' Eight months after the crime, Blanco's mother found two notebooks hidden between drawers in her daughter's room. They were labeled "95-96" and "96-97", and were handwritten by the victim until the day of her murder. Many of these pages contained nothing but "Eva and Miguel", the name of her ex-boyfriend, repeated over and over in different pen colors. Two pages before the last one's end, however, "Eva and Miguel" were replaced by "Eva and 343110". All attempts to discover the meaning of "343110" were unsuccessful, with some hypothesis revolving around the fact that "34" is the phone prefix of Spain, and "110" is Algete's postal code. Blanco's father believed that it was the number of a pager given in a Coca-Cola promotion at the time, while others believed that it was a coded name. Only samples from 45 people were tested, including 12 relatives of Blanco on her father's side, six on her mother's side, her acquaintances and any people with a previous criminal record, with special attention to cases of sexual misconduct and knife violence. ==New evidence and renewed media interest==

By 2007, 30 officers had worked in the case and information on similar cases had been requested from other law enforcement offices including the Ertzaintza and the FBI. A specialist from the University of Santiago de Compostela re-examined the DNA evidence and concluded that it belonged to a man not of European descent. Facial composite After watching the program, a woman reported to authorities that she had seen a suspicious man in the road construction site around 8:00 AM. He was walking in the rain with no umbrella, looked like he had not slept during the night, and appeared to be looking for something before he got in a white Renault 18. The Civil Guard deemed the testimony reliable, in part because a Renault 18 had been reported by other witnesses over the years and the model was compatible with the fiber retrieved from Blanco's body. On 28 October 2013 the Civil Guard released a facial composite made in collaboration with the new witness. The suspect was a man who was between 35 and 40 years old in 1997; 1.70 to 1.80 meters tall; corpulent, between 75 and 80 kg; with short, spiky, brown hair; square and hardened face; dark, sunken eyes; wore a white shirt and a V-neck sweater; and drove a white Renault 18 with red upholstery. A confidential phone number and e-mail address were created for possible tips. By 1 January 2014, 100 e-mails had been received. ==Arrest of Ahmed Chelh Gerj==

Identification At the end of 2013, a new revision of the semen's DNA narrowed the identity of the donor to a man of North African descent. The Civil Guard petitioned the 300 North African men living in Algete in 1997 to provide voluntary samples. Their response was overwhelmingly positive, even though many had left the town and even the country in the intervening years. Fouad Chelh, a former resident of Blanco's neighborhood now living in southern France, Suspect Ahmed Chelh Gerj, 52, was born in Taza, Morocco on 1 March 1963. Spanish woman in 1989 and became a Spanish citizen in the 1990s. They had three children in 1989, 1993 and 1997. His wife was five months pregnant with their third child when Blanco was murdered. The Chelhs were never listed as residents of Algete because they lived in a caravan parked in a plant nursery where Chelh worked as a deliveryman, and which had been lent to them by Chelh's employer. Chelh's residence, next to the Paracuellos de Jarama-Fuente el Saz road, was four kilometers away from the murder scene. Former female customers also remembered him as "a pervert, the kind that makes you feel bad when he's near." Testing confirmed Chelh as the origin of the incriminating semen beyond doubt. On 19 October, Chelh's defence unsuccessfully requested his release pending trial. Chelh's lawyer argued that there was no evidence tying his client to the crime besides DNA, that the hypothesis worked for the past 18 years by the Civil Guard was that Blanco had willingly boarded the car of an adult known to her, and that she had consensual sex before she was killed, according to the same investigation. As a result, it either made no sense to charge Chelh with rape, or to believe that Blanco would have agreed to get in a car with a Moroccan, given her friends' insistence that she would never board the car of a stranger. The lawyer claimed that Blanco would never go willingly with a Moroccan because she harbored neo-Nazi sympathies, as indicated by imagery present in her diaries, and reminded that the investigation had focused early on the neo-Nazi group Bases Autónomas. Blanco's friends denied that she had any relation with neo-Nazis. Chelh's first wife fueled the conspiracy theory in an interview with TVE's La Mañana, where she claimed that there were "several people involved" and that the Chelhs knew who was "behind it all", "more or less." She claimed this time that Chelh came back home between 22:00 and 23:00, that he would not stay out late because she was pregnant, and that he told her that some boys had mugged him, but that he did not want to denounce it because he was afraid. At the next hearing on 15 January, Chelh claimed that two people forced him into a car and threatened him with a navaja in order to make him ejaculate over Blanco, who was inside alive. He insisted that he never penetrated her, but when asked why his semen was found inside the body, he could not answer. Death On 29 January, Chelh was found dead in his cell at Alcalá-Meco prison, having hanged himself with his shoelaces. ==See also==