A MAN, 26, has been locked up after stamping repeatedly on a stranger’s head in an unprovoked street attack in Valencia.
Said L, an Algerian national living in Spain illegally, was arrested hours after the assault in the San Marcelino neighbourhood of Valencia on Friday, July 24.
His victim, a 47-year-old man who arm was in a cast, was rushed to Hospital Doctor Peset before being transferred to intensive care at Hospital La Fe, where he remains in a coma with a brain haemorrhage.
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A witness captured the attack on her mobile phone from her car
He had just visited his mother when he crossed paths with his attacker on Calle Ingeniero Jose Sirera at around 9pm, according to regional paper Levante-EMV.
The two men did not know each other.
Neighbours had confronted Said L over what witnesses described as disruptive behaviour on the street moments earlier, and he turned his anger on the passer-by instead.
He knocked the man down with a kick to the leg, then kicked him repeatedly in the head and stamped on him as he lay on the ground, footage of the attack circulating among residents shows.
Bystanders who tried to intervene were struck and threatened themselves.
“Get out of here or you’ll end up like him,” the attacker told them, witnesses said.
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The video lasts for 90 seconds and shows a horrifying and brutal attack on a man with one arm in a cast
Said L was already known to police, with what officers describe as an extensive criminal record built up in the time he has spent in Spain without legal papers.
He also had a deportation order that had never been carried out.
He had no fixed address and was sleeping in a chabola — a makeshift shack — near Valencia’s Cruz Cubierta district at the time of his arrest.
Policia Nacional Said L was brought before court in Valencia on Sunday.
Judge Tarodo Orti ordered his pre-trial detention with no possibility of bail, citing the severity of the victim’s injuries and a high risk that Said L would abscond given he has no fixed address or documents.
He faces an initial charge of attempted murder, which prosecutors could upgrade to homicide if his victim dies of his injuries.
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Algeria has accepted the return of almost none of its undocumented nationals since April 2022, when a diplomatic rift over Western Sahara led Algiers to freeze deportation cooperation with Madrid, according to the Real Instituto Elcano.
The freeze leaves Spain with no functioning route to deport undocumented Algerian nationals to their home country, even when a court orders it.
The case comes amid a surge in trafficking operations along the Algeria-to-Andalucia route, one Spanish and EU police have targeted with a string of busts this year.
The Fiscalia General del Estado‘s own 2025 annual report describes the Andalucian coast as the stage for a ‘lamentable and eye-catching spectacle’ of narco-lanchas — high-powered speedboats — now running migrants and drugs on the same crossings from Algeria.
Guardia Civil and Policia Nacional officers, working with Europol, dismantled one such network in Almeria on May 29, arresting nine people accused of supplying fuel, boats and forged documents to gangs smuggling both migrants and drugs.
Investigators seized more than 50,000 litres of fuel, two large vessels and 61 kilos of hashish, and found the alleged ringleader had amassed assets worth more than half a million euros in just over a year, funnelled through front companies and testaferros — the paid frontmen used to hide a criminal’s true ownership of property and vehicles.
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