The third section of the Provincial Court of Córdoba decided to suspend the start of the trial scheduled for this Wednesday against five young people accused of a gang rape of a 17-year-old Nordic student that occurred in May 2019 in a home in the … Jewish community. The decision comes after the defense of young man a letter to the court in which she assures that facing a new declaration, even by videoconference, as agreed during the preliminary hearing last week, would present for her a real risk of suicide.
The court ruled that the December 1 preliminary hearing focused on resolving procedural issues and assessing whether the victim during trial. The young woman currently resides in her country of origin and, according to the initial plan, she was going to intervene only via a telematic connection.
The warning from the young woman’s medical-psychological team led the court to temporarily paralyze the process, pending additional reports giving an idea of how to ensure protection of the victim without compromising the right to defense of the five accused, who face sentences of 12 to 24 years in prison each, or a total of 96 years in prison.
The prosecutor in charge of the case, Antonio Romero, explained to ABC after the preliminary hearing that everything was ready to begin this Tuesday, December 10, with the hearings on December 17 and 18. The suspension now requires a complete rescheduling of the calendar, as reported by judicial sources this Tuesday.
The case, in which five young Spaniards are being tried, is reminiscent of the “La Manada affair” which occurred during the “Sanfermines” in its structure. The prosecution indicates in its indictment, to which ABC had access, that the events took place on May 18, 2019 around 5 a.m., when three of the five defendants, who were in Cordoba invited to a bachelor party, returned to the hotel after a night of partying.
Two of them went up to the roof of the establishment to smoke a cigarette while a third went straight to the room to sleep. At one point, the a young student came to this terraceagreed with them, greeted them and asked them for a cigarette.
Packet of tobacco in the room
The prosecutor’s account describes how two of these young men told the young stranger that they had a pack of tobacco in the room and they invited her to accompany them to offer him a cigarette.
Once they arrived at the bedroom door, the two individuals encouraged the young woman to enter and led her to where a friend was sleeping in her bed while the two young men who had come down from the roof had been joined by another member of the group. They all entered the room with the young woman and they locked the same to prevent the 17-year-old minor from fleeing.
At that moment, one of these defendants took out his cell phone to record the scene in which the young woman tried to wake up the person who was sleeping in her bed. After this episode, the three defendants who were in the room began to execute touching despite the opposition she showed, who felt, according to the account reported by the public prosecutor, “intimidated by the presence of the three accused”.
In this way, the young woman was forced, by holding her hand, to perform sexual practices on one of them, and later, despite the young woman’s opposition, three of them they caught her and raped her one of them, and when he finished, the second began to rape her while another held her. The other two companions, who came into the room because they were sharing with the others, shouted insults to frighten the victim while they carried out this brutal attack.
This same point would have been repeated with another of the accused, while the other three would have had a indirect participationeither by witnessing the events or recording them with a cell phone, according to the indictment.
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