The Provincial Court of Cáceres has sentenced Constantin Dumitru, accused of stealing 45 bottles of wine from the Atrio restaurant in the capital of Cáceres, to four years and six months in prison, and Priscila Lara Guevara to four years in prison, as perpetrators responsible for a crime of robbery with force in an establishment open to the public of special gravity.
In addition, they must jointly and severally compensate the insurer Reale with 753,454 euros, which reached an agreement with the owners of Atrio, whom it compensated for the value claimed and which also coincides with the price of the expert opinion that was carried out on the wines that disappeared. from the cellar of the famous restaurant from Cáceres.
The Provincial Court considers as proven facts that the two defendants, by mutual agreement and with the purpose of obtaining an illegal benefit, decided that the woman should stay at the Atrio de Cáceres hotel on October 26, 2021, a place they knew for having previously been planning the event on June 1, June 13 and August 12, 2021.
The reservation was made solely by the woman using a false passport carrying only a backpack that, when Priscila was taken carelessly by an employee, observed that it did not weigh.
The sentence indicates that later, the man showed up to have dinner and stay, without registering, at the hotel. After dinner in the restaurant located in the same, they had a guided tour of the winery and then went up to the room.
At around 2:10 in the morning, the defendant called reception, asking for a salad and repeatedly asking how long it would take for it to be served to the only employee who was in the hotel-restaurant at the time.
The reception employee, after refusing to carry out the order, stating that he was alone and the kitchen closed and surprised by the request, given that they had dined a 14-course tasting menu, at the insistence of the defendant agreed to the request, indicating that it would take at least 20 minutes to serve what was requested.
The employee went to the kitchen, a moment used by the defendant to go to the reception and take an electronic key with which he went to the cellar, but was unsuccessful in opening it because it was not the right key. The employee, after raising the salad, returned to his work station.
Constantin Dumitru, seeing that the key would not open the cellar door, made a call to the woman in the room from the cellar door to return to entertain the receptionist.
In this way, moments later, Priscila Lara Guevara repeated the call to reception, this time, to request a dessert, to which the employee objected again, finally agreeing to bring her some fruit.
The defendant returned to the reception and from a box took the master key number 27, opening the cellar with it, accessing the tasting room where he seized 45 bottles of wine that he kept in a backpack and two large bags with which who went up to the room before the return of the employee to the reception.
The defendants hurriedly left the hotel around 5:00 a.m. with the man carrying the backpack on his back and the two bags with the bottles, in which he had inserted four towels from the bathroom of the hotel room to prevent them from rattling among themselves, climbing to a vehicle, conclude the proven facts of the sentence.
The sentence, handed down by the court of the Provincial Court of Cáceres, chaired by magistrate Joaquín González Casso, is not final and an appeal may be filed against it before the Civil and Criminal Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of Extremadura (TSJEx).
It should be remembered that the trial for this robbery was seen for sentencing last Wednesday after three sessions in which some 16 witnesses passed through and four experts who provided evidence, such as the DNA of biological remains found in the bathroom of the room where they stayed and that they coincided with the defendants, as well as the recordings of the security cameras or the control of the telephones that place them in the hotel the night of the events.
