A Butcher’s stand against the ‘mafia’
Friday, 03 September 2010 09:00
BY the time this article is printed Mohamed Ahmed Sel-Lam, a butcher in Ceuta, Spain’s North African enclave, may be dead. Known as El Vasco (the Basque), a nickname earned from his years in the Basque region His shop is in the Principe district, where violence is an everyday occurrence although the four policemen inside are not investigating a crime. Nor is the police car outside nor the three officers a couple of streets away. They protect El Vasco 24 hours a day and escort him to a safe house each day where he now lives with his wife Fatima because his shop has been set fire to three times in the last year, he has been ambushed twice and his family threatened. Trouble began when El Vasco’s nephew Mohamed Larbi, a conflictive young man with a prison record, fell out with others in Principe and the butcher warned them not to harm one hair of his head. “They kill when they want, they cut off people’s hands when they feel like it and they torture. No-one says anything. Just me. I’ve never been afraid,” El Vasco said. “I defended my nephew because they wanted to kill him. But it could cost me my life.” El Vasco claims that 36-year-old Tafa Sodia, Ceuta’s most notorious criminal with whom he has clashed in the past, is behind his problems. Sodia is banned from entering Ceuta until 2013 but El Vasco insists that Ahmed Abdela Ahmed, nicknamed Dumbo, torched his shop on Sodia’s orders in April last year and shot him twice in the legs a month later. Dumbo was arrested soon after and barred from approaching El Vasco but although the butcher watched his back he was ambushed in his car and shot at 12 times by a masked gunman. The shooting was a warning, El Vasco believes, not an attempted killing but despite a judicial gagging order, it is no secret that another of Sodia’s men – Abdil Ahmed Abdesellan, alias Super - is accused of firing the shots. Jose Manuel Caamaño, head of Ceuta’s provincial plainclothes unit, said El Vasco’s case was “tremendously difficult” but he was confident it would be solved. El Vasco disagrees. “At least they’ve given me protection but for a year I was defenceless. And you know why? Because this is a quarrel between “moros” and nobody cares.”