A Spanish jury on Thursday found a Pakistani man guilty of murdering three siblings in their 70s over debts reportedly linked to an online romance scam.
In Spain, a jury’s guilty verdict is followed by a judge’s sentencing, typically announced days or weeks later.
Public prosecutors are seeking a 36-year prison term for Dilawar Hussain, who admitted to killing two sisters and their disabled brother in Morata de Tajuna, near Madrid, in December 2023.
Hussain has been held in custody since he turned himself in the following month, after police found the siblings’ partially burned bodies inside their home.
The siblings had been beaten to death, possibly with an iron bar, officials said.
The civil guard stated that the motive of the crime appeared to be a debt the siblings had with the suspect, linked to the sisters’ apparent involvement in an online scam, BBC News reported.
Neighbors told Spanish media that two sisters believed they were in long-distance relationships with two apparent U.S. servicemen.
They were led to believe one of the servicemen had died and that the other needed money to cover costs so he could send them a share of a multi-million-euro inheritance — causing the sisters to rack up significant debts.
Hussain, who rented a room in the siblings’ house, reportedly lent the sisters at least $58,000, which they never repaid, prompting him to attack one of the sisters with a hammer in February 2023.
He received a two-year prison sentence for the attack, but it was suspended because it was his first offense, as is customary under Spanish law.
During his testimony on Tuesday at his Madrid trial for the siblings’ murders, Hussain asked for forgiveness and said he “heard voices.”
“I was not in my right mind,” he said, according to Spanish media reports.
Enrique Velilla, a local man who was a friend of the victims, said that the women’s insistence on sending money to their supposed boyfriends had caused them to sell a property they owned in Madrid, BBC News reported.
“We told them that it was all a lie, that it was a scam,” he said. “But they didn’t want to hear the word ‘scam’.”
Mateo Lanzuela/Europa Press via Getty Images
Hussain faces a separate trial for allegedly murdering his 39-year-old Bulgarian cellmate in February 2024 while in a Madrid prison awaiting trial for the siblings’ deaths.
Romance scammers drain billions of dollars from people seeking love, and their tactics have evolved in sinister ways in the online age. More than 64,000 Americans were taken for over $1 billion in romance scams in 2023 — double the $500 million just four years earlier, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
About half of the people who use dating sites say they’ve come across somebody who’s tried to scam them, according to Rep. Brittany Pettersen, a Colorado Democrat who says tech platforms need to do a better job of protecting their users.
“No matter how advanced you think your ability to understand what’s out there, they’re gonna deceive so many people and we really have to get in front of this,” Republican Rep. David Valadao of California told CBS News in 2024.
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