CNN —
Controversial internet personality Andrew Tate and his brother were sentenced to a month in prison on Friday as prosecutors investigated allegations of human trafficking and rape.
Romanian authorities said police issued search warrants in five houses on Thursday and took into custody four suspects – two Britons and two Romanians – as part of the investigation.
The Romanian Directorate of Investigation into Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) said the four suspects were initially held for 24 hours. A court in Bucharest accepted a request by DIICOT to detain Tate and his brother Tristan for an additional 30 days, their lawyer Eugen Vidineac said on Friday.
Speaking to journalists outside the court, Vidineac said the decision would be appealed. “In our view, there is no reason to take the most drastic preventive measures that the Code of Criminal Procedure provides,” he added, according to Portal.
DIICOT claimed that the four suspects formed an organized criminal group stretching from Romania to Britain and the United States to commit the crime of human trafficking.
Authorities allege that two of the suspects “tricked the victims into believing that they intended to enter into marriage/cohabitation” while transporting the victims to Romania and later sexually exploited them with physical violence and coercion.
Authorities also said one of the suspects raped a victim on two separate occasions in March 2022. At least six victims were allegedly “sexually exploited by the organized crime group,” the DIICOT statement said.
On Thursday, DIICOT released an edited, grainy, sometimes blurry video allegedly showing the raids. A man is frisked by the police. It is unclear who is captured in the video.
In a separate video broadcast by CNN affiliate Antena 3, CID officers can be seen escorting Andrew and Tristan Tate into police vehicles.
On Friday, Andrew Tate tweeted from his verified account, “The Matrix has sent their agents.”
Andrew Tate, a former professional kickboxer, is known for his viral tirades across the internet about male dominance, female submission and wealth. He openly advocates violence against women and was previously banned from all major social media platforms until Elon Musk reactivated his Twitter account after taking over the company.
His notoriety began earlier this year, with many adults, including school teachers, raising alarms about his misogynist ideas taking root in the minds of countless youngsters. Before it was shut down, his TikTok account had about 11.6 billion views.
He made headlines this week for a Twitter interaction with Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who told Tate he should get a life after tweeting about his numerous cars “and their respective enormous emissions.”
There has been speculation online that the appearance of a certain pizza box in one of the photos he posted in his altercation with Thunberg alerted authorities to Tate’s presence in Romania.
However, according to Portal, a DIICOT spokesman said the pizza boxes played no part in the arrests.