A North African man has been arrested following separate alleged sex attacks on three British tourists at a Spanish hostel.
The 32-year-old Tunisian suspect pretended to be an employee at the tourist establishment in Valencia before targeting the young women, aged 18 and 19, according to local media.
Police arrested the man following the alleged incident, which took place at around. 1.30am on Tuesday.
According to local reports, the two British women had arrived at the hostel in an Uber, and the man opened the door for them.
He then allegedly tricked them into following him to a bathroom before sexually assaulting them after a struggle.
He is said to have grabbed them by the arms to stop them from leaving when they sensed something was amiss, before groping the older of the two teenagers and trying to kiss the younger woman as he put his hand under her skirt.
Local paper Las Provincias said he then allegedly followed them to the women’s bathroom, took his clothes off and started having a shower.
The female pair responded by calling police, and when they arrived, a third British woman, aged 26, understood to be a roommate of the other two, told cops the same man had sexually assaulted her on Sunday morning.
She said she had been cleaning her teeth in the women’s bathroom, and he put his arms around her after creeping up on her from behind, before rubbing himself against her without her consent.
A man has been arrested after separate alleged sex attacks on three British holidaymakers at a Spanish hostel
A specialist police unit dealing with abused women is now involved.
It was not immediately clear this afternoon if the three Brits had given formal statements to the police.
The travellers’ hostel where the sexual assaults allegedly occurred, a budget accommodation option which gets mixed reviews online, is located in Valencia’s Camins al Grau neighbourhood and is around a 10-minute drive from the historical city centre.
Police have not yet made any official comment, but are expected to do so later today or tomorrow.
The alleged aggressor will appear before an investigating magistrate who will have to decide whether to release him on bail or remand him to prison pending an ongoing investigation.
The incident comes after a van driver was arrested last month on suspicion of abducting a young British tourist on the street of a Spanish holiday hotspot and sexually assaulting her.
He allegedly bundled her into his vehicle after spotting her walking back to her hotel from a nightspot in the Majorcan capital Palma.
Detectives said at the time he got out of the van and grabbed her by the arm to force her into the passenger’s seat.
He then sped off and sexually assaulted her as he drove along the road.
The British woman only managed to escape after the man had to stop at a red light, and two people in a car following them, who had witnessed the street abduction, intervened.
The witnesses managed to take a photograph of the suspect’s licence plate, which was key to enabling police to locate the man and arrest him.
The horror incident happened in the early hours of May 11 on Palma’s iconic seafront promenade called the Paseo Maritimo.
On May 1, a foreign tourist whose nationality has not been revealed was allegedly sexually assaulted on waste ground in the Majorcan city of Manacor, halfway between Palma and the island’s east coast, by two men she had met in a bar said to have spiked her drink.
The holidaymaker said she started feeling unwell after leaving her drink unattended to go to the toilet.
The men she had met that night reacted by offering to drive her back to her hotel, according to police, but allegedly took her to a waste ground and sexually assaulted her on the back seat of the car.
