Alfred Bugeja Il-Porporina, notorious career criminal, dies at the age of 67

Loyalty career Alfred Bueja, better known as IL-Porporina died at the age of 67.

Bugeja died for the elderly in the St. Vincent de Paul house, where he lived during the probation. He had only been out of prison for two weeks.

In an interview from 2024, Buehja said that he was introduced by a school teacher with crime to steal him a few wipers. He was 14 years old.

Within a few years and still a teenager, Bowja would receive his first conviction and prison sentence for car theft.

He would continue to enter and leave prison in the following decades, and his nickname became a well -known name in the 1980s and 1990s as a synonym for crime.

Freech escapes

In 1992 he spent six months on the run after he had escaped police custody in St. Luke's Hospital. He was arrested in November this year when he and another man tried to end a jewelry shop in Marsa.

Bowja was sent back to prison, but less than four months later he escaped again.

He and another inmate, David Monsinur, broke a number of locks, sawed a wall in Corradino through iron bars and sawed a wall when they resigned. The two were caught three weeks later.

The escape led to an approach in prison and to the discharge of the prison manager and many top employees.

Minister at his wedding of the prison

Bauja married in prison in February 1994. His fiancé, Helen Azzopardi, was also a prison inmate.

The wedding gained awareness because Bauja and Azzopardi were allowed to have a wedding reception in prison in which the then interior minister took part in Louis Galea.

Bauja, surrounded by police officers during an indictment in 1992 after one of his escape.

There was a political turmoil and the opposition did not move to trust in Galea and said that wedding reception was symptomatic of the amateurous way of how the prison was led.

Bowja's problems with the law continued until the 21st century.

In 2012 he was celebrated for two and a half years for crime, which was celebrated in 1992. This included running a car, stealing a car and trying to rob a bank.

In 2015 he was imprisoned for another 33 months after he was found guilty in 2008 for theft from a warehouse.

Later this year he was detained for seven years and a fine of 11,500 euros was sentenced to organize a drug contract in his prison cell. Bowja had conspired to import 2 kg cocaine, 1 kg heroin and around 2,000 ecstasy pills from the Netherlands in May 2002.

Also in 2015, Bauja's wife Helen was sentenced to nine -month prison sentence after she was tried to smuggle heroin into prison for him by hiding it in a few shoes.

Later in life, he expressed remorse for the way he had lived his life.

“I started taking drugs in prison. I was 39 years old, ”he said, noticing that his wife had ended up in prison because of him. “If I could, I would serve twice the time in your place,” said Bauja in the TV show Xarabank.

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