2023-10-13 15:58:38
Facade of the headquarters of the National Court, in Madrid, in a file image. PABLO MONGE
Six years ago, Ángel Gonzalo GJ entered the house of his 13-year-old step-granddaughter, taking advantage of the fact that the girl’s parents were working at that time of the morning. The stepgrandfather managed to enter the house through the patio, and walked towards the teenager’s bedroom, where she was sleeping. It didn’t matter to him. Once there, he began touching her legs until she woke up from it. It was then that he placed a machete on the bed and raped the girl, as the National Court has now considered proven, which has sentenced the aggressor, who impregnated the little girl, to 15 years in prison. Her youngest, whom she said she would rape again if she told her parents, did not mention anything to anyone until she suffered a miscarriage months later.
The court, based in Madrid, has just handed down a sentence against this Spaniard of Ecuadorian origin, who is also imposed a punishment of 10 years of supervised freedom after his release from prison and the obligation to compensate the young woman with 100,000 euros for the physical and psychological damage. The attack occurred between August and September 2017 in the city of Machala (Ecuador) —investigators have not been able to determine the exact date, but the minor was diagnosed with a pregnancy of 13 weeks and five days when she was treated after the abortion, according to medical reports.
The case has been tried in Spain because, after the rape was revealed, Ángel Gonzalo GJ left his native country and “took refuge” in the Peninsula, where he was detained in 2019 after receiving an extradition request from the Ecuadorian authorities. . Benefiting from his dual nationality, the National Court refused to hand him over in 2020 because he was Spanish, but agreed to prosecute him here after a complaint from the Spanish Prosecutor’s Office. This court has jurisdiction over crimes committed by Spaniards abroad.
Now, having held the oral hearing against him just a month ago, the court does not believe the excuses of the already convicted man, born in 1969, who was free at the time of the trial.
More information
His version is “hardly credible,” states the ruling, signed by judges Fermín Javier Echarri, Carmen Paloma González and Juan Francisco Martel. The man, a resident of Pamplona (Navarra), denied the attack and explained that he had been a common-law partner for 18 years with the little girl’s paternal grandmother, who died in 2016 of cancer and with whom he had two children. According to what he said, he was living and working in Spain when he found out about his wife’s illness. So he returned to Ecuador before she died. “But he did not have any type of relationship with the minor, neither close nor not close. He simply knew her because she lived near her. But I never touched her,” he said at her oral hearing, where he went so far as to say that she had never gone to that house “when she was the girl alone.” And he stressed that the accusations responded to revenge for an “inheritance problem.”
A thesis that the court discards, which does not appreciate “spurious motives that weaken the credibility” of the victim and her family. What’s more, the magistrates put on the table a whole battery of evidence against the accused: in addition to the testimony of the little girl, they have the statements of the parents and the doctor who treated the girl after the abortion, to whom the young woman told the abuses. As the doctor recalled, when the girl arrived at the clinic in the middle of the morning after having bled profusely at home, she observed that she had suffered an “incomplete abortion” (she found an “umbilical cord in her vagina”) and told her mother that she minor had been 13 weeks pregnant. At that moment, the victim explained to them that she had been raped by “granny’s husband”—whom “they treated like a grandfather,” according to the father.
That same day, the mother informed the Machala Gender Violence Prosecutor’s Office, which launched a criminal case that was cut short by the aggressor’s departure from the country. During the trial held in Spain, her mother said that the accused offered them money to withdraw the complaint “before fleeing.” A DNA analysis was added to the case, indicating 99.9% that Ángel Gonzalo GJ is the father of a fetus that the girl expelled at home, when she began to bleed before taking her to the doctor. The defense tried to overturn this evidence at the hearing. But the judges validated it and added that, even if they had not taken it into account, there is sufficient evidence that “proves” his “participation” in the rape.
There are also several forensic reports that indicate that, in addition to the “physical ailments derived from the abortion,” the girl suffered “other mental ailments,” such as discomfort, sadness, insecurity, lack of concentration, anxiety, sleep problems, reduced appetite and enuresis. nocturnal (urinary incontinence). The Court’s ruling can be appealed.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
#years #prison #stepgrandfather #raped #impregnated #granddaughter #threatening #machete #Society