These women took great care of the staging in detail. First, they took photographs with their fictitious partners and asked those men to leave some items of clothing at their house. With that scenario already set up to simulate a romantic relationship, it was time to take action.
The women would stand on a busy street with their supposed boyfriend and these men would violently attack them in front of everyone. An exhibition of sexist violence that only sought, it has now become known, police intervention.
The Mossos arrived, arrested the aggressors and the victims, always foreigners and the majority African, asked for much more than protection when they were treated. The label of battered woman – they had learned that very well – gave them access to public aid and temporary residence and work authorizations.
It's Operation Luperca. A police action with a balance of 13 women and one man arrested this Thursday in the heart of Lleida. These people – a dozen searches were carried out, as the newspaper Segre reported – are accused of a string of crimes. False complaint, simulation of a crime, falsehood, favoring illegal immigration and membership in a criminal organization.
It was a gang, the chief inspector of the Lleida criminal investigation area, Sergi Mesalles, said yesterday, perfectly organized and with a very specific objective. Led by two women and the only man arrested, who will be brought to justice today after spending their second night in the cells of the Lleida Police Station. The other 11 women (most of them have no criminal record) were released yesterday with charges.
The investigation to unmask this plot has lasted almost a year. The first clue was given by an African woman settled in the Barri Antic of Lleida, when she revealed to the agents that many of her colleagues were obtaining aid and residence permits by pretending to be victims of sexist violence.
The criminal area investigators began to pull the strings and focused their investigations on two of those fake boyfriends, imprisoned for the attacks, which were real. These men – most of those recruited to carry out these beatings are drug addicts or people without resources – admitted to having been paid to appear as sexist aggressors.
The money received compensated, for them, spending time in jail. And with the promised hope that at the time of the trial the complaint would be withdrawn.
Inspector Mesalles reports that the majority of the detained women come from North Africa. And all of them would be related to the same apartments in the old town of Lleida, in which prostitution is carried out. The majority had arrived in this Catalan capital from Huelva.
It is unknown if they made that trip attracted by this plot of false complaints, knowing that in Lleida they could regularize their situation as victims of sexist violence. The investigation remains open and new arrests are not ruled out.
The actions of these women do a disservice to the victims of this scourge and only encourage those who question sexist violence and propagate that many of these complaints are false. Nothing is further from reality. Operation Luperca, judicial sources insist, is an exceptional event, since the percentage of false complaints in the real universe of abuse has always been residual.
