Mother Demands Justice as Missing Woman’s Body Found in Well Near Valencia

The last 18 months have been unbearable for Soraya, Wafaa’s mother, who desperately searched for her daughter’s body, the victim of murder. "There is no more joy in this house," she confides. Yet the young woman’s body was in a well on a farm located 1,250 meters from their home. It had been thrown there since Sunday, November 17, 2019, the very day she was killed.

For Soraya, her daughter had been kidnapped. She firmly believed it until the day David SO El Tuvi, the alleged murderer of Wafaa, was arrested. "I had been telling her for a long time that I had to start thinking about the worst, but she refused to listen," her husband Nabil specifies. After the Civil Guard officer in charge of the case announced the news of Wafaa’s body discovery on Wednesday, June 16, Soraya "collapsed. The five days that followed were horrible. I thought she was dying too," says Nabil, very concerned about his wife’s health.

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Despite this discovery, Soraya is having a hard time accepting the reality. "It’s not my daughter. It’s Marta. Or maybe another girl. It’s not Wafaa," she continued to deny. Even in the face of the DNA test result confirming that it is indeed Wafaa’s body, Soraya still does not believe it, Nabil explains. "I want to know everything that happened. Everything he did to her. And that he spends the rest of his life in prison for everything he did to my daughter," Soraya said angrily to the Civil Guard officers who brought them the DNA test results.

The grieving couple is also outraged by the media’s handling of this case. "How dare they talk about Wafaa, say what she did or didn’t do, if they didn’t know her? How is it possible that they publish this information on television, radio and in newspapers without even knowing if it’s true?" Soraya is outraged. And she adds: "I want them to stop publishing lies about my daughter. I ask them to respect her memory and our pain."

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When asked if they knew the alleged murderer, Soraya answers in the affirmative. "He was part of her group of friends... She talked about him, and other boys and girls. Wafaa was very cheerful, very sociable. She had a lot of friends. How could we have thought that one of them was going to do this to her?" she wonders. "He often came to pick up Wafaa to go have a drink. One day, he took her to eat at this house with the well. Another day, she came back very happy, loaded with avocados they had picked on the farm," Soraya confides, devastated.

But Soraya did not know the dark side of David, a young man described by other friends as being jealous and obsessed in love, and who had already been arrested several times for violence against women with whom he had been in a romantic relationship. "They knew he was obsessed with her and why didn’t they say anything to the Civil Guard when we questioned them?" Soraya lamented.