The travelling tribunal

Outside the courtroom, the sea shimmers. Atlantic waves roll in with white crests of foam. Through the window you can see the bungalows of a holiday resort, an infinity pool, and sunshades made of palm fronds. There is no one on the beach this early in the morning.

It is 17 March 2021 in Paynesville, a suburb of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, in West Africa. In the meeting room of a hotel, which has been converted into a courtroom, a woman is talking about how her son was murdered, some 20 years ago. She is wearing flip-flops, a purple skirt, and a pink headscarf. She bobs her leg and thumps her foot on the stone floor: clap, clap, clap.

Around the witness sit foreigners, white people: four Finnish judges (two male and two female), two Finnish prosecutors, the defendant’s Finnish lawyer and three interpreters. Despite the heat outside, the men are in suits and immaculately ironed shirts. The women wear dark blazers.

“When I reached my parents’ house, soldiers approached me at gunpoint,” the witness says. “The soldiers said, ‘stop! Don’t take another step’.” She describes how the soldiers hauled out everything her father owned from their hut. How they tied up her son, and set the whole village on fire. Her voice becomes quiet and anguished. “Then they shot, and my son was dead.” She begins to cry. From her pocket she pulls a small handkerchief to wipe the tears on her face. The session is adjourned.

After a quarter of an hour it continues. One of the two Finnish prosecutors asks:

“Do you know what the commander’s name was?”

“Yes, I remember it well.”

“What was his name?”

“Angel Gabriel Massaquoi.”

Angel Gabriel, like the Archangel, a messenger of God, and the accused’s surname: Massaquoi. A strange amalgamation.

Gibril Massaquoi is his official name. He was a warlord in the civil war in the West African country of Sierra Leone more than 20 years ago. After the war ended, a Special Court, backed by the UN, was set up to try the most serious crimes. Massaquoi testified as a crown witness, in return for which he was promised immunity from prosecution for his deeds in Sierra Leone. In 2008, he went to Finland, where he lived a peaceful, undisturbed life for more than a decade. Then his past caught up with him. A human rights organisation in Liberia had collected evidence. They accused Massaquoi of crimes committed in neighbouring Liberia, where a civil war was also raging at the time. They alleged that he had murdered, tortured, and raped. And since Massaquoi lives in Finland, it was a Finnish court that took on his case.

In recent years, many states have prosecuted crimes according to the legal principle of universal jurisdiction. It is a principle that only applies to the worst crimes: war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide. In universal jurisdiction cases, the location of a crime does not matter. The crimes are prosecuted even when they occurred in a country thousands of kilometres away. It also does not matter if the alleged perpetrators have long since left their home countries. They are tried by the countries in which they now live.

In recent years many countries have applied the principle of universal jurisdiction: Germany has initiated proceedings against torturers of the Assad regime in Syria and against fighters of the “Islamic State”, France has convicted genocidaires from Rwanda, Senegal has tried the former president of Chad, and Sweden an Iranian executioner. Presumably, crimes committed during the war in Ukraine will also soon be tried in faraway courts.

The Finns, however, took this idea further than most. That’s why lawyers of a Finnish district court are now sitting 7,000 kilometres away from their hometown, asking a woman about the most traumatic moments of her life. Normally, the jurists work in a brick building in the centre of Tampere, Finland’s third largest city. Their experiment has been hailed as the “Finnish way” in international criminal law: Whole courts, with prosecutors, judges, defence lawyers, are travelling in pursuit of crimes – to hear the witnesses in the places where they live, to visit the crime scenes, to get a better understanding of what happened. They hope that this will bring them closer to the truth.

In the spring of 2022, after more than a year of proceedings, the Finnish court will finally pronounce its verdict in the case against Gibril Massaquoi. The result will turn out to be different to what everyone might have expected.

Juhani Paiho, 55, is the man presiding over the trial. He is tall; his head looks like it is carved out of hard rock. In March 2021, more than a year before the verdict, Paiho is sitting by the hotel pool in Monrovia, describing how he came to be the presiding judge in the trial. The other judges were horrified, he says, when the biggest war crimes trial in Finnish history was referred to their small district court in Tampere. But Paiho had googled Liberia on his phone and thought to himself, “You’ll never get a case like this again.”

Paiho is a civil-litigation judge. His bread and butter is maintenance payments, custody disputes, unpaid tradesmen’s bills. But he is also one of the few judges in Tampere with international experience. Years ago, Paiho worked for the European Union in Kosovo for some months. Because of this experience, small as it might have been, he was not only made one of the judges on the trial, but also given the court presidency.

Paiho has seen a lot since then. He drove for three days through the Liberian hinterland to look at crime scenes. He saw dirt roads dissolved in a thunderstorm. He stayed in a hotel where they gave him a bucket of well-water for showers in the morning. One night, he braved a termite invasion. Now he is back in Monrovia, still struggling to reconstruct what exactly happened in Liberia 20 years ago. “We are often unsure if two witnesses are really talking about the same event – or if they are talking about two completely unrelated crimes,” he says. He also mentions how strange the experience of testifying was for some of the witnesses that were brought to Monrovia from faraway villages. Several of them were petrified when they saw the ocean in front of the hotel. They had been told that evil spirits live in the sea.

It is often difficult for the Finnish jurists to tell how reliable the witnesses are – the cultural distance makes everything much harder for them; to interpret what is being said, to probe it, confirm it or disprove it.

Akaa prison in Finland is a 40-minute drive from Tampere, on a lake surrounded by birch and pine trees. 127 people are imprisoned there. One of them is the defendant, Gibril Massaquoi. In Liberia, the Finns could not guarantee his safety, so he stayed back in Finland. He attends his trial mostly via video link from a small room on the ground floor of the prison.

Massaquoi comes into the visiting room wearing a turtleneck jumper, trackpants and slippers. He has been here for two years. The circles under his eyes are deeper, his face gaunter than in the video footage from the war. But he still looks a decade younger than his 52 years.

Massaquoi was a spokesman for the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF, of Sierra Leone. The rebel group started a brutal civil war in 1991 that lasted eleven years and is estimated to have cost the lives of 30,000 to 50,000 people. The RUF also chopped off the arms of thousands of men, women and children. Beforehand, the fighters often asked their victims, the cynical question: “Long sleeve or short sleeve?”

The civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia were closely intertwined. Many soldiers fought on both sides of the border. The RUF supplied diamonds from Sierra Leone’s mines to Liberian president Charles Taylor. In return, the rebel group received weapons.

When talking to Massaquoi one has to remain careful and vigilant. Massaquoi is a media professional. As a spokesperson for the RUF in the late nineties, he regularly gave interviews to foreign journalists. He deflected, denied, and blamed others. When the RUF kidnapped several hundred United Nations blue-beret soldiers in 2000, Massaquoi stood in front of the world press and suggested that the soldiers might have merely got lost in the forest. He offered to send out a search party.

Shortly after the war, in 2002, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission began its work in Sierra Leone. Its final report said Massaquoi was “unique in the RUF” in that he remained a mystery even to those who were very close to him.

“Mr Massaquoi, the other fighters said after the war that you were a mystery to them. Why do you think that was?”

“Because they were jealous.”

Massaquoi never gets loud or aggressive in conversation, even when confronted with the most serious accusations. He instead politely says “thank you for the question”.

In the courtroom in Monrovia, a man tells the Finnish court how his wife and sister were murdered while they were preparing palm oil in the forest. He describes how their bodies were found: his sister lying on the ground, with a baby on her back. The small child survived, miraculously. Another man relates how he buried the half-decomposed bodies of his neighbours. The witnesses describe what happened to them with great emotional force. They show the judges the scars all over their bodies, their arms, and legs, and faces.

The first doubts about Massaquoi’s guilt begin with something that seems trivial in the face of all this visible, undeniable suffering: markers of time. For many Liberians, time is something they do not measure in months and years. It is more defined by the seasons, by the growth of fruits and crops. The illiteracy rate in the country is 51.7 percent. Many people are only able to vaguely estimate their own age.

In a courtroom, however, questions of time become crucial. Massaquoi’s Finnish lawyer, Kaarle Gummerus, asks each witness over and over again: When did this happen? In 2001 or possibly later, in 2003? Gummerus sits at his table, 57 years old, a stiff face like a poker player, and keeps repeating his questions about time until they begin to seem pedantic, almost cruel. The witnesses are often helpless. At one point, a former Liberian soldier says exasperatedly, “I can’t remember everything. My brain is not a computer.”

Gummerus, however, has a good reason for this line of questioning: Massaquoi has an alibi for the entire period after 10th March 2003.

Massaquoi never concealed who he was from the Finnish authorities. They knew who they were bringing into the country. When the United Nations Special Tribunal began its work after the end of the civil war in Sierra Leone, Massaquoi realised more quickly than others what was at stake. He offered to help as a key witness. The investigators of the Special Court for Sierra Leone interviewed him for weeks. The transcripts of his interrogations run up to 1735 pages. Thanks to him, several of the biggest war criminals were arrested and convicted. Massaquoi was not only guaranteed immunity from prosecution for his crimes in Sierra Leone, he was also included in the court’s witness protection programme. Investigators suspected that sooner or later word would get around in Sierra Leone that he was the traitor, who had talked to the investigators. Massaquoi was given round-the-clock armed security guards. He lived in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, until 2008. Then Finland, which had been very supportive of the special tribunal’s creation, offered to shelter him.

For twelve years Massaquoi led an inconspicuous life in Tampere. He lived with his family in social housing on the outskirts of the city. He cleaned the ice-hockey stadium, delivered newspapers on frosty nights. The Finnish police left him alone.

That was until the day the Finns learned that Massaquoi was suspected of having committed war crimes not only in Sierra Leone, but also in Liberia. No one had promised him immunity from prosecution for such acts. In May 2020, the Finnish police arrested him. It was still night, he had just returned from his newspaper round.

The police officers were amazed how calm Massaquoi was after his arrest. He lay down in his cell and fell asleep.

Why was he so visibly unimpressed?

When asked, he says, “I slept well because I am innocent.”

“But what about all the witnesses?”

“They are lying. All 91 witnesses.”

The Finnish trial of Massaquoi is the first war-crimes trial in Liberia. Unlike in Sierra Leone, key players in Liberia’s war remained in prominent positions after it ended. Almost all of them avoided criminal proceedings. Only the former Liberian president Charles Taylor was tried in The Hague in the Netherlands. Otherwise, none of the country’s warlords, generals and executioners have ever been prosecuted. And this despite the fact, that the war in Liberia was even more brutal than the one in Sierra Leone. According to estimates, 250,000 people died between 1989 and 2003, about ten percent of the population.

The perpetrators are in parliament today. They are presidential candidates. You meet them at the headquarters of Charles Taylor’s old party, the National Patriotic Party, which is now part of the governing coalition again. They live in large houses not far from the hotel where the trial is taking place. The Finns have entered a world where the past lives on beneath the surface.

Police inspector Thomas Elfgren has spent so much time in Liberia in the run-up to the trial that his driver has arranged a special number plate for the SUV he uses to drive around Monrovia, which reads: Tuffe1. Tuffe is Elfgren’s nickname. The Finnish police have made multi-week visits to Liberia on five occasions. Elfgren, 67, is tanned and slim. He walks around the city in short-sleeved shirts, three-quarter-length trousers and sandals.

On a morning in March 2021, the inspector is driving through the city’s dense Waterside market district. It is one of the three crime scenes where Massaquoi is alleged to have killed or tortured people. The SUV drives very slowly through the traffic jam. The alleys of the market are narrow, packed to bursting, with piles of stiletto-heeled shoes and pink bras, wheelbarrows full of T-shirts, toilet paper, mangoes, and prickly pears – a fruit that looks like a green, spiky heart.

At a crossroads, Elfgren points to the right and says: “This is where the dead were lying in the street back then.” Today there is a shop selling cooking spoons.

A few metres up the street was the shop where, on one occasion during the war, hungry people broke in to steal food. Soldiers came and opened fire. A witness says in court that he saw Gibril Massaquoi there, shooting people with a pistol. Another claims that Massaquoi had a knife and used it to cut a man’s throat. Still others say he did not kill with his own hands, but gave the orders. The versions are so different that no clear picture emerges of what actually happened that day. Nor can the witnesses say exactly when it happened – they cannot put a date on the murders.

However, they agree on one thing: the battle for Monrovia had already begun. The war had arrived in the capital. And that defines a precise time window for the murders: the battle for Monrovia began in June 2003 and ended two months later.

Massaquoi has an alibi for this period. He was in Sierra Leone, where the war was already over and the work of the special tribunal had already begun. Massaquoi was guarded 24 hours a day by the court’s security guards. Nevertheless, numerous witnesses claim they saw him in Monrovia at the time.

Something is off. Something is not right.

A storm comes in from the sea, fast and without warning. The rain pelts the corrugated iron roofs. It sounds like the growl of a huge, faceless monster. Then comes the thunder, so loud that the prosecutor, Tom Laitinen, winces. As a bolt of lightning flashes over the Atlantic, he covers his ears like a child.

52-year-old Laitinen has a prudent temperament. He often takes long pauses in conversation, as if he needs to sort out his thoughts. The pressure on him is immense. It is an expensive trial. It was Laitinen who suggested moving it to Liberia. He believes you understand things better when you see them in front of you. “We have to assess the whole person, his facial expressions, his gestures, how he speaks. You can’t do that nearly as well on video as when you’re in the same room.”

Laitinen admits the witness interviews are nevertheless often unpredictable for him. “It’s still not clear to me what questions I need to ask to elicit their most important memories.”

In few areas of modern politics is the belief in “progress” as strong as in international criminal law. The dream: a world in which organised, mass cruelty is banished by law. A future where the thought of a prison cell deters potential mass murderers from unleashing their troops.

In reality, justice crawls behind the violence with agonising slowness, often years or decades late. The business of justice is costly, frequently thankless and not infrequently futile.

When the Finnish police arrested Massaquoi, they found a book manuscript on his computer. 372 pages, entitled: The Secret Behind the Gun. Massaquoi says he started writing it more than two decades ago, while he was still in the RUF; it is a mixture of biography and political treatise.

In it, Massaquoi says his family was so poor that he often only ate one meal a day. When the RUF forcibly recruited him, he was in his early twenties and a mathematics teacher at a Catholic school in Pujehun, in southern Sierra Leone, on the border with Liberia. “Actually, I would like to have been an accountant,” he says.

In the text, Massaquoi remembers his first meeting with the leader of the RUF, Foday Sankoh, at a training camp. In an awestruck tone, Massaquoi writes: “We jogged alongside him. It was an electrifying moment.” Later, Sankoh made the young Massaquoi his personal assistant. In the most brutal scene in the book, Massaquoi describes how Sankoh, who was not to survive the civil war, had a woman killed. Sankoh ordered his soldiers to douse her with hot palm oil and then tie her feet to a tree “where she hung,” Massaquoi writes, “until she died”. In our interview in prison, he calls Sankoh a “caring man”.

The Finns are friendly and reserved guests in Monrovia with a curious two-part daily routine. From morning until afternoon, they are their professional titles: a judge, a prosecutor, a defence lawyer, and a policeman. In the evening, they take off their official hats for a few hours. Gummerus, the defence lawyer, and Laitinen, the prosecutor, sit together and eat spaghetti bolognese in the humid night heat. Paiho, the judge, chats by the pool with Elfgren, the police inspector. They talk about their children, their hobbies, about stomach upsets. They are not only closer to the witnesses here, but also closer to each other than they would ever be in Finland. In the end, they will have spent 16 weeks together in West Africa.

In court, it quickly becomes clear that the prosecutor Laitinen is not getting anywhere against Massaquoi’s alibi for the murders in Monrovia. But there are two other alleged offences. Massaquoi is also suspected of being responsible for crimes in the interior of the country that happened earlier, sometime in 2001, long before he turned crown witness for the Special Court.

Lofa County is beautiful and poor. The landscape is hilly. Along the roadside are kapok trees, 70 metres high, the oldest of which were already standing when slave traders dragged people from this region onto their ships 250 years ago. Plumes of smoke rise above the forests. Farmers are clearing land for rice fields.

The village of Kamatahun Hassala is situated on a hill. The houses are made of mud bricks, the roofs of corrugated iron. There is a small mosque. The witnesses in court described this village. In their memories it appeared as a hellish place. During the war, hundreds of people from the surrounding area were rounded up here. Dozens were burnt alive in huts.

Witnesses claimed in court that a soldier who called himself Angel Gabriel gave the orders. One man said this commander tortured him with electric shocks and then urinated in his mouth. Another said that Angel Gabriel had a man killed in order to make soup out of him. In the narratives in court, he is the decisive figure in the massacre.

But when you go to Kamatahun Hassala alone, without a judge or prosecutor, to talk to survivors on the spot, a different picture emerges.

Varfee Konneh lives in a small two-room house. In the bedroom hangs a poster of the American singer Alicia Keys. Konneh grows rice in cleared paddies, just outside the village. When the soldiers came, he was 12 or 13 years old.

He says he saw everything. How people were herded into one of the houses, young men and old, women and children. The fire. The dead.

He only survived because the soldiers used him as an errand boy, says Konneh. He was cooking food and fetching water. Then, while collecting water, he fled.

Who was the commander of the soldiers? Konneh says only one word: “Zigzag.”

Joseph “Zigzag” Marzah was a notorious commander in Charles Taylor’s army, a man who bragged about eating people, even after the war. Few names have spread such terror in Liberia. Marzah is a free man today. He never had to face justice for his crimes.

Three other men in the village who say they were eyewitnesses to the massacre mention this name to DIE ZEIT. They all say Joseph Marzah gave the orders.

Konneh says that fighters from Sierra Leone were also involved in the killings in Kamatahun Hassala. But neither Konneh nor any of the other men can remember a man who called himself “Angel Gabriel” or Gibril Massaquoi. None of these villagers have appeared before the Finnish court.

When Konneh returned to the village with a small group after more than a year on the run, everything was empty and overgrown with plants. “The first few nights,” he says, “we heard voices in the darkness.” They were ghosts, he says.

What did they say?

“Alilor e va ngor? Zizamazza lov e par ngor.”

Who killed me? Zigzag Marzah killed me.

Kaarle Gummerus, Massaquoi’s defence lawyer, sits in his hotel room in Monrovia in a polo shirt and gym shorts, pointing at the screen of his laptop. He has listed all the witnesses interviewed by the Finnish police. Most of them were shown a selection of photos with twelve faces, one of which was of Massaquoi. The witnesses were supposed to identify him.

In the Excel spreadsheet, the lawyer sorted the witnesses by location and date of interview. If someone chose Massaquoi’s picture, the tile is dark green. Those who did not identify Massaquoi show up as a blue tile, and those who were not sure as grey.

Gummerus points to the block of witnesses from Lofa County: it’s almost all blue, with a few grey blocks in between. Not a single tile is green. Not one of the witnesses from Kamatahun Hassala or the surrounding villages identified Gibril Massaquoi as the perpetrator.

71 of the 91 witnesses were shown the photos, and only eight identified Massaquoi. They all came from the capital Monrovia. Massaquoi has an alibi for all their accusations.

“Strange, isn’t it?” says Gummerus.

The man who started the case, who brought it to the Finnish authorities, is sitting on the rooftop terrace of the Boulevard Palace Hotel in Monrovia. Up here, the city is just a distant roar and muted honking. Hassan Bility shows off his scars, one in the crook of each arm. “This is the mark he left behind.” He means Massaquoi. That’s where the rope cut into his flesh, he says. Bility is a short man with ears that stick out. He is the best-known human rights activist in Liberia.

The scars he shows are the result of a common torture method during the Liberian civil war: the arms are tied so tightly behind the back that the tips of the elbows touch. It is immensely painful. Within minutes you lose all feeling in your arms. Bility says it was Massaquoi who tied him up like this, in 2002, in a Taylor-regime torture cellar in Klay Junction, 35 kilometres north of Monrovia. It is the third alleged crime scene. The Finnish prosecution has charged Massaquoi with torture based on Bility’s account.

Bility was a journalist, one of the few who dared to write critically about Charles Taylor. Taylor’s security forces arrested him several times, tortured him, and finally expelled him from the country. Bility went to the USA. After the war, he came back and founded a non-governmental organisation, the Global Justice and Research Project. Bility’s organisation collects evidence against Liberian war criminals living abroad and forwards it to European and American prosecutors. Several war criminals are already in prison as a result of his work, including in Switzerland and the USA.

In 2009, Bility appeared as a witness in the trial against Charles Taylor in The Hague. There he mentioned for the first time that Massaquoi had tortured him. Bility recalled it thus: “He asked me if I knew what the name Gibril meant and I said yes because I speak Arabic. I said it means Gabriel. He said, ‘Okay, I am your Angel Gabriel’.”

At the time, no one cared about that statement. The case was about Taylor, not Massaquoi. It was only years later that Bility’s organisation gathered more evidence of Massaquoi’s guilt – triggering his arrest in Finland.

The strange thing is: Bility was the only one who ever mentioned that Massaquoi had called himself “Angel Gabriel”. In none of the many texts about the RUF, in no interview, in no other source – not even in the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone, which is several thousand pages long – is this nom-de-guerre ever used.

Until the Finnish trial, that is. Then suddenly the vast majority of witnesses were saying that Massaquoi had called himself “Angel Gabriel”.

How does all this fit together?

Perhaps the explanation lies in the fact that the Finnish police officers around Elfgren needed help when they came to Liberia for their investigation. They needed someone who knew the country, who could find witnesses and translate interviews. They needed a fixer.

Anyone who knows as little about a country as the Finns do about Liberia is at the mercy of their local assistants. The interpreters control what the outsiders understand and what they don’t. The Finns hired a man named Albert Kollie, who was one of 14 employees of Hassan Bility’s NGO. The Finns used him for several months, paying his salary during that time. Kollie was absolutely indispensable to them. He located almost all the witnesses in Monrovia and Lofa County who testified against Massaquoi in court.

Kollie was not supposed to interview potential witnesses himself, but only to pass them on to the Finnish police, who would then conduct the interview. This was important: memories are easily manipulated. The mere naming of a suspect can lead witnesses to believe that they recognise him as the perpetrator. The victims have to come up with the name on their own.

In court, Kollie described his approach as follows: “I asked the witnesses if they would be willing to talk about the activities of the RUF. I did not give names. I told them to just tell the police what they had experienced. Some then wanted more information, but I told them: No.”

Anyone who proceeds in this way will run into many dead ends, and have numerous conversations with people who remember the war, remember murders – but do not remember the suspect. Normally, a lot of time will be wasted, before the right kind of witnesses are found.

But that didn’t happen.

In just three and a half months, Kollie found dozens of witnesses who blamed Massaquoi for countless crimes in Monrovia and Lofa County. He had a spectacular rate of success. When Kollie is asked to explain in court how he managed to do it, he says he simply went around the city. “I go to the Ataya shops”, he says – places in the centre of Monrovia where mint green tea is served. He also claims that he found other witnesses on public transport, in buses and shared taxis. He discovered one man buying soap. Each time he overheard people talking about the war. Kollie says he never explicitly asked for Massaquoi.

Massaquoi’s lawyer finds this increasingly implausible. He asks why every single witness Kollie found could remember Massaquoi, of all people.

“I don’t know, I just accepted what they told me,” Kollie said.

Did he insist that the witnesses mention Massaquoi?

“No, not at all.”

Albert Kollie says he came across Gibril Massaquoi at every turn.

This, almost certainly, cannot be true. In other, much more thorough investigations, like the 2009 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia, there is not a single trace of him. The commission recorded more than 17,000 testimonies from the war. But neither Gibril Massaquoi nor “Angel Gabriel” are ever mentioned. If Massaquoi committed war crimes in Liberia, it was in secret. There cannot be that many people who have stories to tell about it.

Why didn’t the Finnish investigators notice that something was wrong?

At one point during our interview, presiding judge Juhani Paiho said that people tend to smooth out stories, look for coherence, fill in gaps. Especially in a foreign country. There is often no other way to proceed.

Albert Kollie gave the Finnish police investigators what they wanted: a guilty person. They willingly accepted the gift.

Furthermore, in doing so, the Finnish court unwittingly provided an incentive that made it easy to manipulate witnesses. Everyone who testified in the trial was given a travel allowance that was small by Finnish standards but huge by Liberian ones. Most witnesses went home with around $100, and some who said they came from far away pocketed up to $500. The daily allowance, without travel expenses, was $20 for witnesses was.

Juhani Paiho, the presiding judge, says he cannot imagine that this massively influenced the witnesses. But the Finns sometimes do not seem to grasp just how poor the people sitting in front of them are. The median daily income in Liberia is two dollars. Many of the witnesses took home enough money to feed their families for several months.

There is no guarantee that physical proximity will bring you closer to the truth. You can be very close and still only see the wrong thing. You can travel a great distance and still misunderstand everything. At the same time, the courtroom is a good corrective. In cross-examination, inventions often fall apart.

War crimes trials must leave the possibility of acquittal. They must demonstrate that, under the rule of law, the consideration of evidence is wide open. Even someone like Gibril Massaquoi, who was deeply involved in one of the cruellest wars in recent decades, must be able to hope to go home a free man in the end, if the crimes he is accused of cannot be proven. Even the acquittal of a bad man can be right.

It is a cold, rainy day in November 2021 in Tampere. All the witnesses in Liberia have been heard, the alleged crime scenes have been visited. The court is back in Finland and Massaquoi is being questioned a second and final time. He is wearing a black bomber jacket and a grey turtleneck.

His defence lawyer asks him, “How many times did you go to the special tribunal in the spring and summer of 2003?”

“Several times, whenever they needed me.”

“Did it ever happen that the investigators wanted to see you and you weren’t there?”

“No, never.”

Massaquoi gives detailed information from 9.30am to 6pm that day. He remains calm, he takes notes, everything he cites sounds plausible. At the end he says: “Nobody in their right mind would do what the prosecution is accusing me of.” No one would go from the safety of a witness-protection programme into a war zone, into the realm of a megalomaniac dictator who had his confidants killed by the dozen because he suspected them of treason.

Massaquoi has an alibi for the murders in Monrovia. Of the alleged witnesses in Lofa County, no one can identify him. And in the case of the torture in Klay Junction, it’s one man’s word against another’s. “I was never there,” Massaquoi says.

All this does not mean that Massaquoi is innocent. Maybe he did kill in Liberia, maybe he really did torture Hassan Bility. But it cannot be proved.

The verdict comes on 29 April 2022, in writing, and sent by email: “The accused Gibril Massaquoi is acquitted on all charges”, it says on page 31 of 850 pages.

Kaarle Gummerus, Massaquoi’s defence lawyer, says on the phone that he will demand compensation for his client of several hundred thousand euros for the long period in prison.

Tom Laitinen, the prosecutor, appealed the verdict earlier this week. Massaquoi himself says he wants to write a PhD thesis – about his own trial.

Translated by Voxeurop.

Barrio Salamanca

A preview of the interactive story published by El Confidencial

It is the ‘prime’ area par excellence of the residential market of Madrid luxury. We are talking about the Salamanca neighborhood, whose origin dates back to the second half of the 19th century and whose history is inextricably linked to two figures. Carlos María de Castro, one of the great Madrid urban planners and architect of the Madrid expansion, and José María de Salamanca y Mayol, Marqués de Salamanca, one of the great landowners of the eastern expansion, where the Salamanca neighborhood was located. The latter was one of the main promoters of a neighborhood (in fact, its name is due to him).

The neighborhood was initially called upon to accommodate the Madrid middle class, but it ended up receiving the nobility and high bourgeoisie of the 19th century and becoming the true heart of the Eixample East due to its rapid organization and provision of services compared to the rest of the areas of Madrid.

In fact, as Borja Carballo Barral explains in ‘The origins of Modern Madrid: El Ensanche Este (1860-1878)’, “the new infrastructures and public services became a reality at the same rate that the buildings flourished”.

From that moment on, interest in living in the Salamanca neighborhood of the wealthier classes has only grown to this day, especially among the rich Latin Americans, and among them, among Venezuelan buyers. A huge appetite that is concentrated in just a handful of streets, which undoubtedly makes it difficult to find not only buildings, but homes that meet the high demands of these buyers, since, although since 2014 there are several rehabilitation projects that have been carried out in the neighborhood, in general they are very old houses and buildings, some of them with almost two centuries of history.

“Salamanca is the favorite neighborhood for Latin Americans who want to have a ‘pied-à-terre’ in Madrid as a bridge to Europe. This type of client values ​​restored classic buildings, if possible with ‘amenities’ and parking spaces, and is willing to pay more to have a premium location close to fashionable places. In addition, the Salamanca neighborhood encompasses the entire most cosmopolitan area of ​​Madrid, where luxury shops and trendy restaurants are located. It is the luxury neighborhood par excellence”, highlights Elena Jori, director of Real Estate at Home Select. “Salamanca and Jerónimos continue to be that ‘object of desire’ for every Latin American investor and a house in Alfonso XII is like being on 5th Avenue contemplating Central Park.”

“The consolidation of the Salamanca neighborhood in recent years as the preferred place for Latin Americans both to live or to spend time has been a natural evolution, since, in a sufficiently large space, at the same time central and very comfortable, they have it everything close and with a lot of variety in every way. Starting with a wide range of restaurants, luxury ’boutiques’, clubs, neighborhood shops and even El Corte Inglés together with very good communication with the rest of the city, airport or train, and with the ease of being able to walk, while in their countries of origin or in cities like Miami they always depend on the car. And let’s not forget the Parque del Retiro, the jewel of the neighborhood and its proximity to it, which is always a plus to keep in mind”, says Luis Valdés, ‘managing director’ of Residential Sales Advisory in Colliers.

In the Architecture Guide of the College of Architects of Madrid (COAM), a database that collects the history of the most representative buildings in the city, there are cataloged about 120 buildings for residential use in the neighborhood, whose construction date dates, in some cases, to the recently released second half of the 19th century, that is, at the height of the construction maelstrom of the Marquis of Salamanca.

Why the Salamanca neighborhood

Why the rise of the Salamanca neighborhood? Why did the bourgeoisie concentrate there and not in other areas? Part of the explanation has to do with the neighborhood’s infrastructures and services. And, in the case of Salamanca, this was a really differentiating aspect compared to other areas of Madrid. Why?

The status conferred by living in the Salamanca neighborhood has remained in force to this day. Although this was not always the case, since, in its origins, bankers, large merchants, rentiers or large owners preferred to live in the old part of the city. Little by little, and especially after the arrival of the tram to the streets of the Salamanca district, a good part of that high bourgeoisie began to abandon the old town in favor of the luxurious houses of the new district.

In fact, the Marquis of Salamanca was key in the arrival of the tram. In 1871, with the help of British capital, he launched “the first tramway in Madrid that linked the Salamanca neighborhood with that of Pozas through the Puerta del Sol”, Borja Carballo Barral recounts.

In 19th century Madrid, the greater the number of buildings built in a neighborhood, the greater the share of income from land tax. Some income that, as Borja Carballo relates, was invested in the new public infrastructure that the neighborhood needed. Which, as he explains in his academic work, “in the long run became the main mechanism of segregation and social compartmentalization in the development of the Ensanche de Madrid”.

And it is that, as the author explains, “the ruling lay in the fact that the land tax paid for the new buildings was recorded based on the quality of the buildings and not the number of rooms or the number of tenants that could In this way, those neighborhoods that had more luxurious and ornate buildings, but that housed a smaller population, as in the case of the Salamanca neighborhood, had a larger income account with which to deal with the payments of the infrastructure works and public services. On the other hand, those spaces of the expansion in which most of the popular classes resided, always maintained a reduced capacity to carry out the necessary public investments”.

Vertical segregation

Unlike what happens today, at the end of the 19th century, the different social classes could come to live not only in the same neighborhood, but in the same building, although the nobility used to live in their own palaces. There was what experts have called vertical segregation.

“All the large industrial landowning families moved to the Salamanca neighborhood, the luxury neighborhood par excellence. The wealthy families built large palaces (Linares, Zabálburu or Arenzana), but buildings were also built where the middle class could live and even the lower middle class. Not surprisingly, until the elevator was invented, different social classes coexisted in the same building. As you went up the floor, the classes were less affluent”, explains the architect Carlos Lamela.

The Palace of the Marqués Linares (1863) is a characteristic example of 19th century Madrid palatial architecture. It was abandoned for a long period of time, and was even threatened with demolition, according to the COAM Architecture Guide. In 1976, however, it was declared a historical-artistic monument and was acquired by the Madrid City Council. Currently, it is the headquarters of Casa de América.

It was very common for the owner of the building to establish the main residence on the first floor —on many occasions with its own entrance— and allocate the rest of the homes for rent. Obviously, as you went up in height, the rents varied. A century and a half ago, the higher the altitude, the lower the rent paid. Example of a rental in a building in the Salamanca neighborhood. Salustiano Olózga, 6. 1878. Page 237.

“The upper floors, the basements and the attics were the exclusive predominance of the day laborer families, mostly of immigrant origin who could only afford to face the cheapest rents. The floods of immigrants As they flowed towards the capital, they settled in those areas that were most affordable for their meager coffers, whether in roof tiles, inns or in the attics or basements of the new buildings erected”, Borja Carballo relates.

“It is very curious that, back in the 19th century, the service lived on the highest floors of the buildings and the families on the ground floor. In the oldest and most exclusive estates owned by Claudio Coello, for example, you can see how the houses Located on the ground floor, they have four-meter-high ceilings and wider walls.Comfort prevailed, due to the lack of elevators and the temperature, as the rooms are cooler in summer and warmer in winter due to the walls and the protection of the high floors”, highlights Óscar Larrea, John Taylor’s ‘executive director’.

Within the Salamanca neighborhood, there are several examples that we can find of the interest of the high bourgeoisie in those first floors of the buildings. Velázquez 21 is a clear example. The building was commissioned by Francisco Sánchez-Pleites, Marquis of Frómista, to the architect José Espelius Anduaga in order to use the main floor for his own residence and the rest, including the penthouses, for rent, according to the Madrid Architecture Guide. of the COAM. This building was also pioneering because “for the first time the storage rooms for the tenants were located in the semi-basement, instead of in the usual attics, thus reducing the consequences of a fortuitous fire”.

But, in addition, as one advanced in height, not only did social status decrease, but the floors were smaller and there were more units than on the lower floors.

“There was a very strong socioeconomic segregation in height. From those residents who could afford to pay almost 600 pesetas a month in rent for a house at their complete disposal to those poor wretches who lived poorly without seeing the light in basements through which who paid an average of 13.44 pesetas a month”, says Borja Carballo in ‘The origins of Modern Madrid: El Ensanche Este (1860-1878)’. “Attics, entrance halls, basements, mezzanines, garages and ground floors housed a large population that did not belong to New Madrid. A legion of domestic service workers who lived in their employers’ houses.”

The elevator revolution

The situation turned around with the arrival of elevators at the end of the 19th century as their installation began to spread among the large buildings in the center of the capital. Those who previously wanted to live on those first floors began to move to the upper floors, especially the last one. The attics and basements became the attics as we know them today, an asset whose revaluation in recent years has been spectacular due to the enormous shortage of product for sale on the market. The first floors, on the contrary, began to be used as offices already in the 20th century.

Elisa Pérez Honrubia, in her book ‘Madrid of the 19th century (Ensanche del barrio del Marqués de Salamanca)’, also gives an account of this vertical segregation and its end with the arrival of the elevator.

“The first two floors were occupied by the upper bourgeoisie and the third by the lower bourgeoisie. The attic was left for the servants. Sometimes, inside each building there is an unlandscaped patio that favors the ventilation and lighting of the interior rooms of the building “, he explains in reference to the housing block limited by Serrano, Claudio Coello, Goya and Jorge Juan streets (Serrano 32), one of the first two buildings built and which followed the Castro Plan that included interior gardens in the block patios . “These buildings were built without an elevator, which gave rise to a vertical segregation that disappeared at the end of the 19th century (1893) when these were installed,” Pérez Honrubia points out.

Large number of gates

Another of the striking points of the Ensanche Este was the large number of gates built in the wealthier areas of the Salamanca district, which prompted the rise of this type of profession that had a very low economic remuneration. In fact, “the lower floors, but especially the entrance halls, represented the real opportunity for those workers with little or no qualification to share a residence with social classes of greater economic power, being able to benefit from this fact,” writes Carballo.

“A vital example of this reality is found in the porter’s office at number 7 Calle Lista —currently Calle de José Ortega y Gasset— inhabited by the couple formed by Sebastián and Brígida, who came from the Asturian town of Yepes, and their 9-year-old niece. Baldomera years old. While Sebastián declared, as the head of the family, to be a bricklayer’s laborer and earn 1.75 pesetas a day, it was Brígida who acted as the caretaker of a building used as garages and belonging to the Singer Company. As is logical, It did not mean the same to occupy the goal of a property located in the Salamanca neighborhood —where the doorman occupied one of the lowest echelons of the property— than to do it in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Madrid or Arganzuela —where the doorman could be, to a certain extent, a privileged person for having insured accommodation—”, says Borja Carballo.

Horizontal segregation

If vertical segregation was a reality in the Salamanca district, so was horizontal segregation. That is to say, it was not the same to live in a certain street in the Salamanca neighborhood than in another. Something that continues to happen today.

The nobility lived in their palaces

The nobility that decided to settle in the Salamanca district built their own palaces as a symbol of social status. Three of the most famous were the work of the architect Cristóbal Lecumberri, another of the great figures of 19th century Madrid. As Elena Jori recalls, “Lecumberri built 3 small hotels on Villanueva street, number 16, 18 and 20 (between Serrano and Claudio Coello streets). Currently only 18 is in use. Number 16 became a residential building in 1950. Until 1970, number 20 was a school that was demolished and transformed into another residential building.”

At number 18, the Casa-Palacio de los Marqueses de Bolaños still stands and is owned by a rich Mexican who has spent several years trying to sell it. He bought it in 2014 for more than 10 million euros and expects to obtain more than 20 with its sale, that is, more than double. According to the COAM Guide, it is the “only survivor of the group of isolated hotels that the Marquis built from Salamanca in the Ensanche and which were complemented by the apartment houses in a closed block”.

Why were few mansions built in the neighborhood? The Ensanche de Castro plan was too ambitious and met with little interest from the owners of the land and areas to be built. Without forgetting that the potential buyers of the houses, which were too expensive for the middle class, were also very few, which meant that only the areas around the Paseo de la Castellana were filled with palaces or houses of a certain category.

Villanueva 18 was one of the small palaces built by the Marquis of Salamanca and one of the first to be built in the Ensanche, next to the old bullring in Madrid. After its construction, it was acquired by Luis María Pérez de Guzmán Nieulant, senator of the kingdom and deputy of the Cortes, as well as the first Marquis of Bolaños, a title created by the Queen Regent María Cristina de Habsburgo in 1886.

About the Marquis and his wife an intense cultural life developed. The musical evenings at the mansion were famous at the time and were regularly attended by personalities such as Isaac Albéniz, Joaquín Sorolla and Cecilia Pla, among others. While prominent members of the aristocracy such as the Duchess of Medinaceli, Rosa Bauer or the Marquise of Acapulco also met.

Figure of the Marquis of Salamanca

The name of the Salamanca neighborhood comes from José de Salamanca y Mayol, Marquis of Salamanca, one of the most influential and wealthy men in Spain. His goal was to build 350 buildings spread over blocks of eight or 12 buildings, but he went bankrupt trying. Borja Carballo says that, since 1862, he invested more than 60 million reais in land.

*** From those years, from the time of the Marquis of Salamanca, are also the aforementioned Villanueva 18 (1865); the Palace of Zabálburu, in Marqués del Duero 7 (1872); the Palace of the Marqués de Linares, in Alcalá 55 (1872); the houses of the Compañía de Seguros La Peninsular (1863) at Calle Cid 3 and 5; the houses for Eusebio and Isidoro Matas (1872) in Alcalá 61; the houses for Sebastián Martínez (1876) at Salustiano Olózaga 7, or the houses and palace house of the Marquise de la Laguna (1863) on Calle Recoletos 4 to 12, 5.7, 15 and 17/Villalar 3 to 13. Also Jorge Juan 12, a set of commercial and hotel establishments (1870). Some old stables, garages and dairy farms in the Salamanca district. A homogeneous complex originally intended for auxiliary functions and equipment for the first bourgeois homes in the Eixample of Salamanca, now converted into premises.

Its financial problems began to be reflected in the quality of its constructions, although the buildings would continue to make a difference compared to other areas of Madrid. More homes began to be included in each building to increase rental income and to make better use of space, the interior gardens disappeared. In fact, only two blocks, the first two, included a garden in the courtyard of the block, as Castro had projected.

“One of the main innovations of the Castro Plan in the development of the Ensanche was, precisely, the approach of the block patios as indoor places for recreation and common life, which would improve the living conditions of the population, until then tending to buildings fully consolidated”, explain Paloma Relinque, director of CBRE’s Madrid office and Samuel Población, national director of residential and land at CBRE.

“Unfortunately, with the passage of time, this model would be abandoned, as improper uses were allowed and abusive land speculation was imposed, increasing heights, occupying interior green spaces, etc., since only the first two blocks, between the streets de Villanueva, Jorge Juan and Goya, today preserve this primitive arrangement”, according to the COAM Guide.

For Carlos Lamela, “the Salamanca neighborhood is the great urban operation of one of the most important men that Spain had. A great businessman of the first level, with contacts throughout Europe. He promoted the railway, worked on the stock market and in large corporations like almost all businessmen and he was also very tempted by the real estate issue and by creating a new neighborhood in Madrid in what were then the outskirts”.

“It was a bet and a very important investment to the point that it ruined him,” recalls Lamela. “It started with a series of blocks on Villanueva and Serrano, just as they were initially planned. We are talking about 1860-1870, when the entire bourgeoisie began to consider living there in larger, sunnier homes, with airy spaces and more open streets — the car had not yet arrived. Apples that were made taking the model of Baron Haussman —Napoleon III— for Paris, with gardens inside. However, later those spaces destined for gardens were filled with workshops, garages, factories …”.

The marquis had his own palace. At number 10 Paseo de Recoletos, a building that has remained standing to this day and stands on the former country house of the Count of Oñate. In the mid-19th century, it was considered “the richest and most modern palace in Madrid”, as stated in the COAM Guide. It was acquired by Banco Hipotecario to install its headquarters there, which led to successive extensions, the most important being after the Civil War.

The most representative buildings

Within the Salamanca district, there are several examples that we can find of the interest of the upper bourgeoisie in those first floors of the buildings.

Velázquez 21 (1904) is a clear example. The building was commissioned by Francisco Sánchez-Pleites, Marquis of Frómista, to the architect José Espelius Anduaga, in order to use the main floor for his own residence and the rest, including the attics, for rent, according to the Architecture Guide of Madrid prepared by the College of Architects of Madrid (COAM). This building was also pioneering because “for the first time the storage rooms for the tenants were located in the semi-basement, instead of in the usual attics, thus reducing the consequences of a fortuitous fire”.

During the 1960s, part of the building was adapted as a commercial premises and the first floors were occupied for years by the famous Gancedo tapestries, until the building was sold in 2019 to the owners of the Grifols pharmaceutical company, which is renovating it to make floors. deluxe.

Less than 400 meters from Velázquez 21, at Serrano 9 (1908), is the former palace of the Marquis de Portago, current headquarters of the Illustrious Bar Association. The building was built in 1908 for the Count of Mejorada, brother of the Marquis of Portago. The main floor, as in Velázquez 21, was dedicated to the owner’s palace and the upper floors to large private homes. It was converted into offices in 1975.

Another example is the Palacio de Castanedo, at Velázquez 63 (1905), whose main floor and part of the ground floor —specifically the garage, garage and garden— were for the exclusive use of the promoter, Julio Castanedo , while the remaining floors were used for three rental homes, one per level, for the high bourgeoisie. It is the typical bourgeois residence from the beginning of the century in the Ensanche.

Count Aranda 7 (1888). Two residential buildings for rent for the Madrid bourgeoisie. Attics for storage rooms. The attics, which did not exist as we know them today, but were attics or basements, were reserved for servants or were even used as storage rooms that, unlike what happens today, occupied the highest floors of the apartments. buildings.

Alcalá 93 (1901). Former palace house of Federico Ortiz who established his residence on the main floor and the rest was used for rental housing.

Villanueva 13 (1896). Dwellings for the Count of Valmaseda for rent. And Lagasca 23 (1895). Homes for the Marquis of Cubas also intended for rent. In both cases, the first project was scrapped due to its lack of profitability.

Claudio Coello 14 to 28 (1863). These blocks, predominantly residential, are the first urban complex built within the Madrid Ensanche projected by Castro, with the direct promotion of the Marquis of Salamanca. Absolute respect for the large block patio, conceived as an interior garden.

Others, although they have been maintained, have changed their use. Serrano 46, for example, is one of the original buildings in the Salamanca district. It was expanded in three heights between 1954 and 1957. Currently, it houses the ICON Embassy hotel.

Many of the buildings from that second half of the 19th century, not only in the Salamanca district, but in the rest of Madrid, have disappeared. “20% or 30% disappeared due to urban pressure. They were not considered an asset of cultural interest that had to be protected, so many of these historic buildings were sold and demolished to build another one,” laments Carlos Lamela.

***An example, where the PP headquarters currently stands, at Génova 13 —Almagro neighborhood—, used to be the palace of the Marquises of Bermad. It was demolished in 1977 because until 1978 there was no plan for the protection of historic buildings.

The disappearance of those buildings gave rise to modern architecture, explains Lamela. “The lack of protection of the buildings, together with the appearance of modern architecture and the general plans of the 70s and 80s that contemplated very high buildable areas, favored the disappearance of historic buildings. An example was the disappearance of the fire station on the street O’Donell 4, next to El Retiro Park, which was auctioned by the City Council. The Torres de Valencia were built on the ground”.

According to the COAM Guide, the Madrid City Council, in order to achieve a better yield for the land, gave it maximum buildability, “which caused a strong controversy during its construction.”

“Architectural fashion is changing. An example of this is the Garrigues headquarters at Hemosilla 3, the Edificio Girasol at José Ortega y Gasset 23 (1964), built on the corner site occupied by Francisco Silvela’s mansion, a work of Pioneer in the Lista neighborhood, built in 1898. Another clear example of modern architecture is the Fundación Juan March building (1971), at Castelló 77. However, despite everything, the general character of the neighborhood is maintained, it is quite homogeneous”, concludes Lamela.

Today

In the 21st century, the Salamanca neighborhood is one of the richest and most exclusive neighborhoods in the city. According to data from the Tax Agency, in 2018 it ranked fourth in all of Spain with an average gross income of 95,492 euros, only behind La Moraleja (Alcobendas, Madrid), Vallvidrera-Tibidabo i Les Planes (Barcelona) and Somosaguas-Húmera. (Pozuelo de Alarcón, Madrid).

In addition, its privileged location in the center of the city, as well as the presence of all the large luxury and fashion stores worldwide, place it in the spotlight, especially for Venezuelan buyers, who have given a strong boost to the luxury residential, with the rehabilitation of several buildings and with the purchase of some of the most expensive homes in the capital.

In its barely 5,000 square meters of surface, records have been broken in the luxury residential market, but also in offices, hotels and ‘retail’.

“We will have to get used to buying a ‘singular’ product to reform at €8,000 and €9,000/m2 and in new construction at prices above €14,000/m2,” says Elena Jori.

And it is that the enormous shortage of product for sale plays in their favor. “Salamanca will continue to be the most demanded neighborhood and it will also be the one that monopolizes the highest increases due to the lack of product,” according to Óscar Larrea, whose opinion Luis Valdés shares. “Due to a shortage of new-build homes, and the high existing demand, prices are reaching averages around €16,000/m2, but here it is very important to specify that it is necessary for the product to meet certain essential conditions in terms of its location within the neighborhood, level of finishes and qualities, ‘parking’, ‘amenities’ and services. If you do not meet all the conditions, the price suffers a discount, and the current customer knows this, not everything is valid. Likewise, the penthouses follow another line, and here the price range is very heterogeneous”.

“Another characteristic of the district is the high degree of protection of the existing buildings, especially in the Salamanca and Castellana area, which makes possible renovations extremely difficult,” added Paloma Relinque and Samuel Población from CBRE.

All these factors have contributed to ‘feeding’ the price of housing and rentals in the Salamanca neighborhood and have made its price per residential square meter the highest in the entire municipality, exceeding 5,700 euros at the end of 2020. square meter. In addition, it is the second highest residential rental price, only behind Chamberí, close to 17.5 euros per square meter per month, according to CBRE data.

In their latest study on the neighbourhood, Living Loving Madrid-Salamanca highlights how the district is with the lowest rate of primary residence, only 75%, and highlighting the rate of empty homes, around 16% of the available stock, which On the one hand, the value of the homes in this district is explained as an investment product, and not due to intensive use by the buyer of the same; and on the other, due to the existence of very old houses, without reform, which do not present ideal habitability conditions.

Salamanca has been, and is, the quintessential wealthy neighborhood in Madrid where many would like to live —and where some have managed to do so in the past. However, a century and a half after his birth, only a privileged few can afford it. Today more than ever, living in the Salamanca neighborhood is a luxury.

* The information regarding the most representative buildings in the Salamanca neighborhood has been extracted from the Architecture Guide of the College of Architects of Madrid (COAM).

** The data regarding rental prices in the sections referring to vertical and horizontal segregation have been extracted from ‘The origins of Modern Madrid: El Ensanche Este (1860-1878)’ by Borja Carballo Barral.

*** Data have been obtained from the Continuous Register Statistics and from the INE.