Two ETA Prisoners Escape from the Emergency Ward

The escape of two ETA prisoners from the Emergency Ward turns their violent arrival into a crisis that spreads across the asylum: staff must search a sprawling former monastery for fugitives believed to be armed, only for the search to end with both men discovered dead in its basement.

Background and Escape

The two men had been admitted on the same day as their escape. Dolores Bernardos warned the director that they should be separated, judging them dangerous together because they emboldened one another and competed to prove their toughness. Their first reported assault was against a social worker from Guipúzcoa, whom they slapped for not speaking Basque. During the initial inspection, one prisoner violently kneed the attendant Melitón Deza in the testicles; after Deza recovered and knocked him down with a punch, the incident made plain how quickly the new arrivals could turn routine supervision into a physical confrontation.

The escape itself was reported when staff from the Emergency Ward arrived in agitation: the prisoners had gagged and bound the guard with their own shirts, then fled. Their clothing thus became the means by which they disabled the person charged with watching them. The breach did not mean they had got beyond the hospital grounds. The outer gates in the wall had already been closed, leaving staff and patients to consider where inside the extensive complex the men might be hiding.

Search and Discovery

The search extended into the women’s ward: officers inspected cupboards, made patients open parcels containing their belongings, checked the showers and toilets, then left the ward in considerable agitation. The women spent time checking whether anything had been taken. Among those who pieced together the implications were Alice Gould and Maruja Maqueira. They inferred that the police were acting on the escape and that the fugitives were thought to be armed, since at least one kitchen knife was missing.

The closed outer gates narrowed the possibilities without making the search easy. The men could not have left the hospital grounds after escaping the Emergency Ward, so Alice and Maruja reasoned that they must be somewhere in the central building, the agricultural buildings, the Charterhouse, or one of the many underground corridors running beneath the former monastery. The scale and antiquity of the site turned confinement into a labyrinth: the prisoners were still inside, but their whereabouts remained unknown.

The uncertainty ended with a report that the two ETA prisoners had been found in the cellars of the old Charterhouse. Both were dead, their throats cut. The order for everyone to remain where they were continued as the bodies were taken to the morgue, where the forensic examiner was expected to have work to do. Their escape therefore became more than a breach of ward security: it led to a double killing inside the asylum, while leaving the identity of the killer unresolved at the moment the bodies were discovered.

The Open Regime Under Pressure

The escape unfolded against the hospital’s open regime, under which patients could move with relative freedom through the building and grounds. They might gather in the bar for dominoes, brisca, or parchís, stroll in the gardens, work in occupational workshops for pay, or even take a bus to nearby villages. That latitude was not the same as an absence of boundaries: the closed gates still confined the fugitives to the grounds, and the search abruptly narrowed everyone’s freedom of movement. The episode exposes the tension built into the institution’s model—an asylum organized around everyday liberty could still become a place of enforced waiting when violence made control urgent.

Rumor and the Limits of Knowledge

Before the discovery was reported, the escape had already become a story circulating through the hospital. On the morning after the fugitives disappeared, conversation centered on the ETA men and the atrocities attributed to them, embellished with fantasies that spread alongside the known facts. The later announcement that both had been found with their throats cut gave the crisis a terrible certainty—the men were dead—but did not identify who had killed them. In that gap between confirmed violence and unresolved responsibility, the asylum’s crowded rumor mill echoed the same uncertainty as its hidden corridors: accounts multiplied, while the decisive explanation remained out of reach.