Prosecution seeks over 40 years in prison for Sabadell gang rape perpetrators

BarcelonaNine men were arrested accused of a gang rape in February 2019 in an abandoned warehouse in Sabadell but only four will stand trial next week. The Barcelona Court will hear the case next Tuesday and Wednesday in which at least three more men will be missing, according to the Prosecutor's Office. The four defendants, who are between 26 and 32 years old, face over 40 years in prison. The prosecutor considers all of them to be necessary cooperators of the rapes and one of them also a perpetrator. That is why it makes them responsible for the three sexual assaults inside the warehouse.

The Prosecutor's Office explains that the events took place in the early hours of February 3, 2019 when the victim - who was 18 years old at the time - left a nightclub and a man who could not be identified during the investigation grabbed her by the neck, put her against the wall and pulled up her sweatshirt. He assaulted her by touching her body and inserting a finger into her vagina. The prosecutor claims that the girl was left "without the ability to react" and that the man took her, against her will, to the abandoned warehouse where the four defendants were and a fifth who has been on the run since late February 2019, when he did not appear in court.

Once inside the warehouse, the prosecution adds that the unidentified man communicated to the others his intention to rape the girl again. "She was just a few meters away from all of them, who observed her pitiful state: curled up on the floor, completely dazed and in intense fear," he describes, to the point that she had urinated on herself. That man took her to a room separated from the main area by a curtain where he penetrated her and forced her to perform fellatio on him. When he left, a second man, not identified during the investigation, entered and committed the same sexual assault. The scene was also repeated by one of the four accused.

The latter told the girl, who was in a state of shock, to get dressed and led her out of the warehouse by the arm. Outside in the street she ran towards a passing car and called for help, and the car took her to the Sabadell police. Both she and the car's passenger and driver recognised the man who had taken her out of the warehouse before the examining magistrate, and the man was the first to enter prison. Two more of those who will be judged are also in prison on remand.

Four crimes of aggression

In its qualification of the facts, the prosecutor speaks of four crimes of sexual assault with penetration: the first outside the nightclub and the other three inside the warehouse. Despite the fact that in three of the crimes the perpetrators have not been located -they are the two unidentified men-, the four accused are considered accomplices to the three rapes inside the premises and one of them is also a perpetrator. The prosecution requests that they be convicted under article 180.1.2 of the Penal Code, which covers sexual assaults committed "by the joint action of two or more persons".

The request for three of the accused, one as perpetrator and cooperator and the other two as cooperators, is 40 and a half years in prison (13 and a half years for each of the three rapes inside the warehouse). For the fourth, as a cooperator, it is 37 and a half years (12 and a half years for each). The prosecutor wants part of the sentence to be served in Spain and the rest to be replaced by deportation, with a ban on returning for 10 years. It also asks that between them they pay €60,000 in compensation to the victim for physical, mental and moral damages. The girl suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.