British couple arrested ‘trying to flee Magaluf after trashing hotel room’
A British couple who trashed their four-star hotel room in Magaluf have been arrested while attempting to flee back to the UK.
Londoners Aishah Tasnim, 28 and Yahya Habibullah Wahid, 27, fled the Innside by Melia Calvia Beach after ‘deliberately’ causing thousands of pounds of damage to their room before checking out.
A hotel worker went to check on the couple’s room after management received reports of loud noises. They were greeted by one of the guests, who answered the door and claimed everything was okay.
But once the holidaymakers had left, staff returned to the room and found two TVs smashed, the shower door broken and several cups had been damaged, with glass and bed clothes strewn all over the floor.
The pair were held at Majorca’s Palma Airport before their flights back to Britain after police were alerted and held in custody for nearly 48 hours before being hauled to court for a speedy trial.
On Saturday the pair confessed to causing criminal damage after agreeing to strike a plea bargain deal with prosecutors.
They were told to compensate the hotel for the £875 of damage they had caused and accepted a fine of around £300 each.
It was not immediately clear this morning why the two Brits caused the damage, although as part of their plea bargain deal they accepted it was ‘deliberate’ and not committed by accident.
Public prosecutors had said they wanted them to be hit with a higher fine before the matter was resolved in court in Palma.
The arrests occurred on Friday afternoon but were not made public until after the court hearing and the couple had spent a night in police custody. It is not yet clear if they have already handed over the money they owe or are paying in instalments.
At the start of August, nine Dutch tourists aged 18 to 20 were held after allegedly causing nearly £1,800 to a hotel in S’Arenal on the eastern end of the Playa de Palma area of Majorca.
The group are said to have made a large hole in a wall between two rooms at the three-star MLL Palma Bay Club Resort before leaving the hotel without officially checking out.
They were arrested at Majorca airport as they tried to fly home and hauled to court. A judge confiscated their passports and told them they would only have them returned once they paid for the damage they were accused of causing.
Locals in Palma have organised two large anti-mass tourism demonstrations already this year to protest over problems they say are caused by too many holidaymakers, including the lack of affordable housing because of the number of Airbnb-style rentals and traffic chaos.
They have also highlighted badly-behaving tourists as another problem.
Thousands of people attended the Palma events, one of a number of anti-mass tourism protests that have taken place around Spain this year in places like the Balearic Islands, the Costa Blanca and the Canary Islands.
Marchers were heard chanting ‘Tourists go home’ as they passed through a central square in Palma during the first protests on May 25.
A second huge protest in Palma on July 21 passed off peacefully, although some demonstrators used Spain’s Euros final win to poke fun at English tourists and others branded British holidaymakers ‘drunks.’
The banners they were carrying as they took to the streets of the island capital included one which said in a gloating play on words over a picture of Kyle Walker: ‘The only thing coming home is you’ followed by the 2-1 scoreline printed between England and Spain flags.
Another of the banners the protestors carried said in English, despite pleas from regional government spokesman Antoni Costa to locals to show foreign visitors ‘respect’ ahead of the march: ‘Take back your drunks, give back our homes.’
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