(ANSAmed) - MADRID, FEBRUARY 13 - A 55-year-old man committed
suicide on Wednesday in Alicante, southern Spain, while awaiting
forced eviction after falling behind on payments, police sources
were quoted by the ABC daily as saying.
The suicide is the fourth one connected with seized property or
evictions over the past 24 hours in the country. The man's
identity has not been released. His body was found hanged in one
of the rooms in his home in Calle Poeta Sansano, in Alicante's
Los Angeles district by the judicial officials tasked with
carrying out the eviction when they entered the house at 12:30pm
on Wednesday with city police.
According to an initial reconstruction, the victim was in rented
housing and owed many months' rent to the owner, who had filed a
complaint with the judicial authorities. On Tuesday the platform
'Stop a los Desahucios' (Stop Evictions) of the Basque region
Biskaia reported the suicide of a 56-year-old in the Basque
region Basauri due to problems paying off his mortgage, while a
retired couple also took their lives the same day in their
Majorca home after receiving an eviction notice for mortgage
non-payment.
In response to the growing number of protests called by citizen
groups and Stop a los Desahucios, on Tuesday the Popular Party
(which governs with an absolute majority) began the
parliamentary procedure for a draft law based on a people's
initiative signed by 1.4 million citizens to halt evictions for
the most vulnerable sections of society. The draft law also
provides for an elimination of mortgages after the sale of the
property by owners in arrears. (ANSAmed).
