From Monday to Friday, he clocked in dutifully at the central post office in the Spanish city of Alicante, picking up bags and bags of mail to be delivered.
But exactly what the former letter carrier did next is now under investigation after more than 20,000 undelivered letters dating back to 2012 and 2013 were found crammed into bin bags at his home.
The discovery came after the 62-year-old, who has not been named by police, sold his house in Biar, a town of about 3,600 people at the foot of the mountains near Alicante. When a construction crew showed up to renovate the newly purchased house, they found rubbish bags scattered throughout.
After the man ignored repeated pleas to empty the house, the builders began opening the bags. What they found were stacks of sealed letters, bills and frayed official correspondence dating back a decade, all of them destined for residents in one area of Alicante.
“There was not one package,” police sources told the newspaper El País, “because they are subject to registration and a more thorough follow-up by the post office.”
Police suspicions swiftly fell on the former owner of the house. In 2013, the post office had opted not to renew his temporary contract, citing what police described as “irregularities” that had plagued his delivery route in his year as a letter carrier.
The man was briefly arrested by the Guardia Civil last week and accused of “infidelity in the safekeeping of documents”.
The trove of stolen correspondence, in the meantime, has been handed back to Spain’s post office. The letters will remain at the disposition of judicial authorities during the investigation, until a judge determines that the letters – posted more than a decade ago – can finally be delivered.
• The headline of this article was amended on 7 June 2022 to refer to the letters as “undelivered”, not “unposted”.
