Sister of Torremolinos murder victim: 'He wouldn't let her wear make-up or have social media'

The older sister of Paula, the woman who was allegedly murdered by her partner Marco Romeo in Torremolinos last year, has spoken about some of the warning signs in their relationship.

"He wouldn't let her wear make-up or have social media. He was very jealous," said Fatima, Paula's older sister, when looking back at the tragic story and threading together signs that didn't feel quite right. Paula's alleged killer is also under investigation for murdering a previous partner who had been missing for nine years, Sibora Gagani.

The relationship between Fatima and Paula was always very close. They grew up in Churriana - Fatima was the eldest and Paula, the second of three siblings - although they later moved to El Palo. They considered themselves to be from there. "Paula was a smart, intelligent girl who got straight As. She liked chess and was a good chess player. She was the best athlete in the school. She won all the endurance tests," Fatima said.

Paula wanted to study criminology, but a toxic relationship led her astray and pushed her towards drugs, Fatima said. That's when her problems began.

Although they lived in different towns and saw little of each other, the two talked to each other every day. "Paula told me everything," said Fatima, who did not read too much into the warning signs of her relationship with Marco as she was convinced her sister would never hide anything or fall back into the spiral of domestic violence.

"The first time it happened to her - with a partner before Marco - she didn't hesitate for a minute. She called me and said, 'Fatima, he's hitting me'. I was the one who called the police myself and reported it," Fatima added.

Then in 2020, Paula told Fatima she had met an Italian man. She spoke very highly of him: that he was a great cook, that he treated her very well, that he was organised around the house and that he paid attention to the finer details such as bringing her breakfast in bed. In reality, Marco had an almost prison-like routine: he got up early, made the bed, cleaned the house, did the laundry.... and there was a dark side.

At the beginning of the relationship, one of Paula's daughters sent several WhatsApp audios to her aunt - the police tried to recover them, but the mobile had been restored and they were deleted. Her daughter had said that her mother and Marco had argued all afternoon, and that he stayed at the foot of the bed where she was sleeping and that he held a knife in his hand. Fatima asked her sister about it and she told her that it had probably been a nightmare of the girl, who was five years old at the time.

One day, Paula told her sister that Marco didn't like her make-up, that he was jealous, but Fatima knew her sister was jealous too, so she didn't think anything of it. Nor did it surprise her that he didn't want her to make a profile because "all her partners had controlled her social media", so Paula decided it was better not to have them.

Even so, Fatima could not imagine that her sister would go through gender-based violence again, let alone not tell her about it. And they didn't notice anything about Marco that made them suspicious, she said. "Those kind of men do their job very well. He fooled the whole family: my mum, my grandmother.... He always had a very calm attitude. And when they had an argument, they tried to make us see that she was the one who was crazy. He fooled us all," Fatima said.

Everyone except for Fatima's partner was fooled. "My fella didn't like it. He said he was going to do something to Paula," Fatima said. His misgivings stemmed from a first break-up between the couple. He didn't like the way Marco tried to convince Paula to resume the relationship, which was bordering on "harassment".

They really knew very little about him; that he was Italian, that he was 45 years old and that he didn't want to go back to his country under any circumstances. "When I asked my sister about Marco's life, I realised that I didn't know anything about him," she said. One day, a friend in Torremolinos told Fatima that her sister's boyfriend had been investigated for the disappearance of a girl. "I told Paula about it and she explained that she knew about it because she had seen it in some newspapers she had found on him."

The girl was Sibora Gagani, a 22-year-old Italian-Albanian who disappeared in July 2014, days after breaking off her relationship with Marco. "He told my sister that they argued and that she [Sibora] left, which she used to do, and that he and the family was looking for her. Paula believed him and they didn't talk about it anymore." Sibora's body was found in June last year after Marco, already arrested for killing Paula, confessed that his ex-girlfriend was walled up in the flat they shared in the Calvario neighbourhood in Torremolinos.

The only suspicious behaviour was noticed by Fatima a week before her sister's murder. She had come to spend a few days in Malaga and, before leaving, she wanted to spend time with Paula. "On that trip, I did notice him strictly controlling the food and drink she was having. He was very upset and didn't like her going out with me," Fatima said.

A few days before the crime, Marco called Fatima to tell her that Paula had left him and kicked him out of the house. She told him to leave Paula alone, and hung up the phone. "I called my sister on 16 May. She told me they had broken up and didn't explain anything else. I asked her if she was afraid, probably because my fella had been going on about how he didn't like him, and she replied that she wasn't, that she felt sorry for him because he had nowhere else to go," Fatima said.

The next day, Marco set Paula up and, according to the prosecution, murdered her by stabbing her 16 times with a 31.5-centimetre kitchen knife he had stolen from the bar where he worked. When the police called Fatima to tell her that her sister had been found dead, she asked: "Did he kill her?"

Fatima knows that nobody is going to give her sister back to her, but she asked for justice for her and for women who suffer abuse, "who have to open their eyes". The family, represented by lawyer Guillermo Smerdou, want the sentence to be served in full: "If it's 28 years - that's the sentence the prosecutor is asking for - it should really be 28 years, and not that in eight years he'll be out. After having killed two girls and having manipulated the system, he cannot go free for good behaviour. Paula did not deserve that death. Not Paula, not any woman," Fatima said.