In Badalona yesterday there was no talk of anything else. On Saturday afternoon, a 13-year-old girl was allegedly raped by a pack of at least eight attackers. A kilometer and a half separates the place of the attack, at number 208 Eduard Maristany street, from the Màgic shopping center, a sad scene of four other sexual assaults in her bathrooms.
The Central Unit for Sexual Assaults (UCAS) of the Mossos d'Esquadra has been working against the clock since Saturday night to reconstruct the events and name all the young people who participated in the sexual assault. At least four have already been identified, but they are under 14 years of age. Or what is the same, their condition of indictable makes their arrest impossible.
Police work is focused on the rest of the minors, at least four others, who went to the wasteland at the request of the first young man who had met the victim.
You have to try to put yourself in the shoes of a victim who has just suffered an attack of such a magnitude to understand that it is not easy for her to identify suspects or even reconstruct what happened that afternoon. Hence, the investigators need to prove that the rest of the suspects were in that field and participated in the attack, before proceeding with the arrest.
The chief magistrate of Court 1 of Badalona, on duty that weekend, works hand in hand with the specialized police of the central unit. There is no respite in this priority investigation. For hours, in the UCAS offices of the Les Corts police station, all the security cameras around the scene of the attack have been viewed to locate all the members of a herd that, according to the victim, arrived in two turns.
At the same time, practically in parallel, the scientific police laboratories are working on the remains collected at the scene of the attack, on the clothes and body of the victim and on the sweatshirts of some suspects who were left there at the moment who stampeded when they saw the first patrol car approaching.
That genetic material has to be matched with that of the suspects. Telephones also play an essential role in this investigation. Not only because each of them will mark the location of those investigated, but also because of the messages that were exchanged between them.
The victim claimed that she had met a young man on Instagram the week before. She showed investigators the messages. She met him in Badalona, and had consensual sex. Later three friends of the first appeared initially and another three a little later.
Hence the importance of the messages with that call that the alleged instigator was able to make to the rest of his friends.
The future mayor of Badalona, Xavier Albiol, spoke in the morning on the Jordi Basté program on Rac1 and beyond his concern for the events and the reiteration of the scenario, the city, and with minors as protagonists, announced that the City Council He will appear as a private prosecution in the legal case that is opened.
The Consistory has offered the victim's family all the social, health and psychological support they need. The minor is being cared for by the Can Ruti team of specialists, but she has a police officer with whom she maintains dialogue and with whom she can communicate at any time of the day.
