Facade of the headquarters of the National Court of Justice in Madrid, in a file photo. 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 had to work at that time of the morning. The step-grandfather managed to enter the house through the terrace and went to the teenager’s bedroom where she was sleeping. He did not care. Once there, he started touching her legs until she woke up. At that time he put a machete on the bed and raped the girl, which the regional court now considers to be proven and has sentenced the attacker who impregnated the little girl to 15 years in prison. The minor, who he said would rape her again if she told her parents, said nothing to anyone until she suffered a miscarriage months later.
The Madrid-based court has just handed down a sentence against the Spaniard of Ecuadorian origin, who will also be imposed, upon his release from prison, a sentence of 10 years of supervised freedom and the obligation to compensate the young woman 100,000 euros for physical and psychological harm. The attack occurred between August and September 2017 in the city of Machala (Ecuador) – investigators were unable to determine the exact date, but the minor was diagnosed with a pregnancy of 13 weeks and five days during post-abortion treatment. according to medical reports.
The case was heard in Spain because Ángel Gonzalo GJ left his home country after the rape was discovered and “sought refuge” in the peninsula, where he was arrested in 2019 after receiving an extradition request from the Ecuadorian authorities. Due to his dual nationality, the National Court rejected his extradition in 2020 on the grounds that he was Spanish, but agreed to prosecute him here following a complaint from Spanish prosecutors. This court has jurisdiction over crimes committed by Spaniards abroad.
After the oral hearing against him took place 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 hearing.
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His version is “hardly credible,” says the ruling, signed by judges Fermín Javier Echarri, Carmen Paloma González and Juan Francisco Martel. The man, a resident of Pamplona (Navarre), denied the attack and explained that he had been a life partner for 18 years of the little girl’s paternal grandmother, who died of cancer in 2016, and with whom he had two children. According to him, he was living and working in Spain when he found out about his wife’s illness. So he returned to Ecuador before her death. “But he had no relationship whatsoever with the minor, either close or not. I knew her simply because she lived nearby. But I never touched her,” he said at the hearing, even going so far as to say he never went into that house “when the girl was alone.” And he stressed that the allegations were revenge for a “hereditary problem.”
A theory that the court rejects because it does not appreciate “false motives that weaken the credibility” of the victim and his family. In addition, the judges put a whole range of evidence against the defendant on the table: in addition to the statement of the little girl, they have the statements of the parents and the doctor who treated the girl after the abortion, to whom the child belongs, the woman said the abuses. As the doctor recalled, when the girl arrived at the clinic in the middle of the morning after bleeding profusely at home, she noticed that she had suffered an “incomplete abortion” (she found an “umbilical cord in her vagina”) and told Her mother told her she was a minor and was 13 weeks pregnant. That’s when the victim explained to them that she had been raped by “grandma’s husband” – who they “treated like a grandfather,” according to the father.
On the same day, the mother informed the Gender Violence Prosecutor’s Office in Machala, which opened a criminal case, but this was aborted by the attacker’s departure from the country. During the trial in Spain, the mother said that the defendant had offered them money “before they fled” to withdraw the lawsuit. A DNA analysis has been added to the case that indicates 99.9% that Ángel Gonzalo GJ is the father of a fetus that the girl expelled at home when it began to bleed before going to the doctor. The defense attempted to refute this evidence at the hearing. But the judges confirmed it, adding that even if they had not taken it into account, there was enough evidence to “prove” his “involvement” in the rape.
There are also several forensic reports indicating that in addition to the “physical discomfort resulting from the abortion,” the girl suffered from “other psychological complaints,” such as loss of appetite and enuresis. Nocturnal (urinary incontinence). The court’s decision can be appealed.
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