Moroccan Woman Murdered in Madrid Despite Restraining Order, Sparking Domestic Violence Probe

The victim had filed a complaint against her ex-husband for domestic violence, which led the judge to issue a 500-meter restraining order against him. But the measure was apparently not effective, as it did not prevent the accused from going to the victim’s home, who had moved 350 meters from her former residence, to kill her, according to Vozpopuli.

The Moroccan woman was one of thousands of victims of domestic violence registered in the Comprehensive Monitoring System for Gender Violence Cases (Viogen). Yet the system did not work properly to detect that she was in danger.

Read: Moroccan Mother of Three Fatally Stabbed by Ex-Husband in Spain, Children Witness Attack

"This is a failure of the system that we must analyze, not only the executive branch, but also the judicial branch," Victoria Rosell, the government delegate against gender violence, had already explained in December, after the murder in Liaño de Villaescusa (Cantabria) of a 40-year-old woman by her 43-year-old ex-husband who had a restraining order on the victim and their daughter.

The government delegate in Madrid, Mercedes González, and the mayor of Pozuelo de Alarcón, Susana Pérez Quislant, acknowledge that something went wrong in the procedure. "It is very difficult, when a man wants to kill a woman, to prevent it; but we must expand the mechanisms and see what other types of measures could have been taken..." González stressed. For the mayor of Pozuelo, the local police "were aware" that the victim and the murderer were living less than 500 meters apart, the distance set by the restraining order.