After a nine-year-old girl was kidnapped and taken from Spain to Bolivia, authorities feared the worst. They found her in the rainforest nine months later – but that wasn’t the end of her ordeal
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n 27 August 2013, a tall, spirited nine-year-old girl with long, well-brushed hair boarded an overnight coach in Barcelona. Nada Itrab was bright and observant. At school, she regularly came top of her class. Even now, she carried a notebook, eager to record the things she would discover on this trip. She had been given a camera, too – a cheap, lilac-coloured digital model which, since she was unused to luxuries, seemed to her like a treasure.
In eight hours, Nada would be at Barajas airport in the Spanish capital, Madrid. She would take her first flight, heading for Bolivia’s largest city, Santa Cruz de la Sierra. To her, the trip was an adventure, like something from the storybooks that she read at her local library in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, a city just south of Barcelona. The daughter of undocumented immigrants from Morocco, Nada had lived there since she was four.
Only one other person was travelling with Nada. Grover Morales was a neighbour with a saintly air. In La Florida, the poor neighbourhood in which he and Nada’s family lived, Morales made a point of greeting everyone, regardless of race or faith. He read religious books, not just the Christian Bible, but also the Torah and the Qur’an. He made Nada’s family food. He had installed a bath for them with his own hands. For Morales, a Bolivian man in his mid-30s, this was a business and family trip. He was going home to pick up jewellery and bring it back to sell, or so he said. He offered to take Nada as a reward for her excellent schoolwork. They would be back in a week. Her parents signed a notarised document permitting Nada to travel with him.
