Juan Torres Serra, known as El Pirata (the Pirate), has undergone emergency surgery at Son Espases Hospital after being subjected to a brutal assault at a finca in Binissalem on Friday morning.
The attack has been described as torture. Three intruders tied him to a bed and assaulted him with blunt objects and an axe. After some 45 minutes they left the property. Despite severe injuries to his face and body, he was able to call for help. The Guardia Civil and medics arrived shortly after 9am.
He is a known criminal who is suspected of involvement in the disappearances of four men in Mallorca and Ibiza since the late 1990s.
Investigators say that the attack was not meant to kill him but to cause him as much harm as possible. They believe it is linked to the disappearances and that information had been sought regarding the whereabouts of at least one of the four. It could also have been a warning to get him to leave the property.
He occupied it after the owner, Antonio Llabrés, disappeared in 2020. The tenant of the property, he was arrested in December of that year but released on bail. No body has been found and there has been no confession.
The attackers left the scene in an old grey Volkswagen Golf, registration IB9924CY. The Guardia suspect that the car had been stolen.
Now 61 and from Ibiza, Juan Torres Serra was jailed for nine years for two kidnappings in Ibiza before the first of the four people disappeared in 1997 - a lawyer, Antonio Ferrer Juan. He was placed under investigation and was then arrested the following year after Ferrer's car was found at a property in Ibiza. This belonged to a German, Thomas Egner. He also disappeared.
In 2008, a third man, Francisco López, went missing in Ibiza. Torres was again among the suspects. By that time he was living in Mallorca and wasn't arrested. And in summer 2020, 50-year-old Antonio Llabrés disappeared.