Garrido Attacks Nuria Otaño

Garrido’s attack on Nuria Otaño is recounted through its aftermath, where the evidence of prolonged captivity and attempted murder gives way to a striking reversal: Nuria is no longer simply the woman he imprisoned, but a survivor preparing to defend herself if he returns.

The Attack and Its Aftermath

When Jonan Etxaide and Inspector Montes visit Nuria, she receives them in a blue dress and matching jacket, her short hair held back by a broad, bright headband. She wears no makeup, though her nails are painted dark. Her smile is shy but stays in place as she leads them to the sitting room and offers coffee. She repeats her account of what happened, but now speaks with a distance absent from her first telling, as if the violence had happened to another woman. Jonan recognizes that this separation reflects how she has had to regard the experience. The scene does not replay the assault; instead, Nuria’s altered manner shows its continuing effect while also marking her return to ordinary choices about how to appear and receive visitors.

The house records the attack more plainly than her account does. A bullet hole in the door is partly hidden behind an affected-looking poster of flowers, but the shot’s residue remains visible around its edges. A new double-barrel shotgun stands beside the window. Montes tells Nuria that it should be kept in a gun cabinet; she replies that she was about to put it away when they arrived. The weapon, the concealed damage, and her explanation make the room feel less like a settled home than a place arranged for the possibility of another confrontation.

Outside, Jonan asks Montes what he thinks. Montes believes that if Garrido comes back for his wife, Nuria will kill him. Jonan agrees, having noticed how carefully she has changed the house and herself: the sitting-room curtains remain wide open so she can watch anyone approaching; the furniture has been shifted; coffee, biscuits, and the shotgun are near the window; and she may be sleeping on the sofa to keep watch. The floral poster covers the marks of the gunshot without erasing them, while Nuria’s dress, headband, and painted nails signal a visible change from the oversized tracksuit she had worn before. Jonan’s conclusion is that she has become a sniper—a description of her readiness and vigilance, not a claim that the threat has disappeared.

Garrido’s Violence and the Investigation

The attack also becomes part of the case against Antonio Garrido, rather than an isolated episode of domestic violence. Amaia tells James that the man arrested the previous day is responsible for the desecrations at Arizkun and had tried to kill a woman in Elizondo after holding her captive for two years. She adds that he may also have disturbed the graves at Juanitaenea. The woman in Elizondo is Nuria: her return to a guarded household follows a prolonged captivity and an attempt on her life, not merely a single sudden assault. Amaia’s account to James makes the consequences immediate for their plans together, since she has to remain for Garrido’s statement instead of accompanying him.

In custody, Garrido is confronted with the contrast between the people he targeted and the resistance he encountered. Montes accuses him of preying on frightened children and vulnerable women, and says that he failed to intimidate the boy who reported him. He then turns to Nuria: Garrido has seen how she fought back, including tearing off one of his ears, and Montes emphasizes that she would be capable of hurting him again if given the chance. The exchange recasts her not as a passive victim but as someone who has already disrupted Garrido’s control over her.

Garrido’s reaction does not settle into remorse or a clear confession. He snarls at Montes, then rocks rhythmically as if soothing himself and mutters an incoherent litany. After repeating the movement about a dozen times, he stops and smiles again, saying he will talk later. The shift from menace to self-contained ritual leaves the interview unresolved, while Nuria’s preparations at home show the practical aftermath: even with Garrido arrested, she has arranged her surroundings around the possibility that danger may return.

The Attack Within the Wider Case

The investigation gives Garrido’s attack a second frame: it is one strand in a series of crimes whose shared details suggest that the visible abusers may not be the only actors. At first, Amaia Salazar treated the severing of a wife’s arm as possibly incidental. The limb had been cut off at the elbow with something both toothed and sharp, perhaps an electric knife or jigsaw; she considered whether the husband had taken a ring or tried to hinder identification, while acknowledging that neither explanation made much sense inside his own home. That uncertainty matters to the account of Nuria’s ordeal: the assault belongs to a case in which investigators must separate a perpetrator’s direct violence from actions that may have been carried out by someone else.

A prison-wall inscription sharpened the pattern. A photograph showed a single word, TARTTALO, scratched firmly into plaster with the handle of a toothbrush; paint had been laid over it, but the grooves remained legible under the slanting flash. The same message, written in the same distinctive form, appeared in the cell of the Logroño wife-murderer, who later died by suicide. Amaia noted that the unusual spelling, with two t’s, made the repeated writing more identifying than a general resemblance between crimes. Three cases were then known, with the possibility of more. Their accused killers shared familiar features of domestic violence—close relationships to their victims, prolonged abuse, substance use, and volatile behavior—while the repeated post-mortem removal of the same arm, which never appeared at the scene, stood out as the element that did not fit.

Jasón Medina’s confession made the gap between a killer’s actions and the missing arm especially stark. He admitted raping Johana Márquez, strangling her, and violating her body after death, yet appeared bewildered when questioned about the amputation. After killing her impulsively, he had gone home for a rope, intending to imitate a crime he had read about; when he returned, Johana’s arm was gone. He had also felt watched and wondered whether Johana’s ghost was following him. These details do not make Garrido responsible for the missing limbs; rather, they show why the investigators distinguish his violence against Nuria from the unexplained signature running through the wider series.

That distinction leads to the investigators’ theory that someone was identifying and following likely offenders. If Medina’s crime was unplanned, the person who took the arm would have had to arrive at precisely the right moment. The proposed explanation was that this person knew Medina, could recognize and profile violent men, and had followed him. Set beside that theory, Nuria’s survival and preparations acquire a particular force: Garrido’s threat is immediate and personal, while the case surrounding him asks who else may be moving unseen around acts of violence.

A Threat Still in the Landscape

As Jonan Etxaide and Inspector Montes leave Nuria’s house, the worsening rain carries the scene from the danger she has prepared to meet indoors to a landscape under pressure. Streets are flooded, the drains cannot keep pace, and water splashes upward from the pavement as if the rain were rising from the ground. On Pedro Axular Street, they stop at the railing where the Baztán River bends; its swollen water has climbed almost to the edge of the promenade. This does not lessen the specificity of Nuria’s danger or resolve what will happen if Garrido returns. Instead, the abrupt widening from a watched window and a loaded shotgun to a river nearing its banks leaves her recovery set within a world where threats remain active, and where vigilance offers protection without certainty.