Student 'strangled By Freed Monster'

In Ecuador Gilberto Chamba was known as the Monster of Machala, a serial murderer and rapist who went to jail in 1993 for strangling six young women.

Now police are convinced Chamba has struck again, 5,000 miles away, murdering a university student in the north-western Spanish city of Lérida.

A man with the same name who also fits Chamba's description was arrested last week after his fingerprints were found on a cloth used to strangle 21-year-old law student María Isabel Bascuñana.

The victim had been discovered in the boot of her car, which had Chamba's fingerprints on it.

Interpol last night confirmed that the arrested man was the same person who left a trail of corpses behind him in Ecuador, the Spanish news agency EFE reported. Police sources told EFE that the fingerprints sent to Ecuador had matched those on the file of the man known as the Monster of Machala.

"I don't know how he came to leave the country, whether he did so legally or illegally," Oscar Solano, the judge in the Ecuadorian province of El Oro who was in charge of the case there, told the Spanish newspaper El País yesterday.

Chamba, 43, reportedly left jail four years ago after receiving a pardon and obtained a passport in his own name which did not include any register of his police record.

The pardon, which came as he was serving a 16-year prison term, was one of 250 handed out that year to mark the Roman Catholic church's jubilee year.

When he applied to emigrate to Spain no evidence of his police record was found, and he was allowed into the country as a legal immigrant.

The man now believed to have been the Monster of Machala has been living in Spain with a foreign resident's permit and a work permit.

Two months ago he found a job as a watchman at a car park near Lérida's university, where his victim reportedly used to complain to friends about the catcalls he directed at her when she parked there.

Chamba, a former Ecuadorian army soldier and taxi driver who was married and living in Spain with his family, was among those interviewed after the 21-year-old disappeared. He was eventually arrested on the basis of fingerprint evidence.

A judge has remanded him in custody on suspicion of murder but he has denied killing the student.

It was only when an Ecuadorian journalist recognised the photograph and the name of the man detained in Lérida that police realised they might have a serial murderer on their hands. "There are some faces that can never be forgotten," the journalist Alberto Chávez told Ecuador's Franja Digital news website.

The Gilberto Chamba arrested in Spain not only shares a name with the Monster of Machala but also reportedly has the same passport number and his mother's name is the same.

"From what I have read in the press, Chamba showed the same passive nature in front of the Spanish police as he showed in front of me," said Judge Solano. "Only psychopaths are capable of acting like this, denying their guilt after so much damage."

Chamba, however, publicly confessed his crimes in Ecuador at a press conference in 1993 before he was tried for raping eight women and killing six of them.

"I raped them after they were dead for my personal satisfaction. I am guilty and did all this alone," he was reported as saying at the time.

His victims were strangled, with a yellow cord found around their necks, according to press reports in Ecuador.

Spanish police are now trying to trace Chamba's movements around Spain in the four years since he arrived. They are also running through their records looking for unsolved murders of young women over the same period.