![]() Offering to walk her, the men accompanied her past busy terraces before turning into quieter and increasingly deserted streets. She was tired, and after about 10 minutes, she said she was going to head back to a friend’s car, where she would spend the night. In the woman’s recollection, the chat was friendly but unremarkable. The woman and Prenda compared tattoos and talked football while the other men hovered around, occasionally dipping in and out of the conversation. The other two members were a police officer, Antonio Manuel Guerrero, and Ángel Boza, the rookie of the group, who, like Prenda, was unemployed. Another member, Jesús Escudero, a hairdresser, had a wolf paw tattoo on his ribcage. One member of the group, a soldier named Alfonso Jesús Cabezuelo, had a tattoo of a howling wolf on his foot, along with the words “The power of the wolf lies in the pack”. Prenda had come to the festival with a group of friends, four men in their mid-20s, who called themselves la manada – the wolf pack. His name was José Ángel Prenda, a 26-year-old from Seville with a broad face and a paunchy stomach across which he had inked his name in large, gothic script. There, on the bench, a man struck up conversation with her. As she would later testify in court, she nudged her way past the crowds to a bench on the edge of the square to get her bearings. The young woman, who had just finished her first year of university, had been drinking with a few people she had met that night, but after leaving them to dance, she lost sight of them. “People come here to fuck,” a hospital receptionist told me wearily, fanning herself against the July heat, when I attended last year. But the festival has not lost its somewhat seedy reputation. The festival has long had a reputation for bad behaviour – exasperated locals often complain about outsiders turning their town into a lawless city – and after photos of young women being groped by groups of men went viral in 2013, the city launched an anti-sexual assault campaign whose symbol, a red hand, was plastered across billboards, walls and buses. Every morning at the stroke of 8am, the bravest festivalgoers sprint ahead of a group of bulls leading them from the pen where they’re kept to the ring where they will die later that day. The weeklong festival combines a religious celebration of the city’s patron saint, San Fermin, with the eponymous bull run – and copious amounts of alcohol. ![]() She was standing on Plaza del Castillo, a square in the centre of the northern Spanish city of Pamplona, which was hosting its annual festival, the running of the bulls. ![]() In the early hours of 7 July 2016, surrounded by throngs of revellers dancing and drinking, an 18-year-old woman suddenly found herself alone.
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