The accused of the theft of 45 bottles at the Atrio de Cáceres restaurant-hotel, Constantin Dumitru, has proclaimed his innocence at trial this Wednesday and has wondered where the bottles are "if I am the thief".
Dumitru has invoked his right to the last word in the trial that has been held at the Provincial Court of Cáceres, which has been seen for sentencing today.
The other defendant, Priscila Guevara, has remained silent before the court, which will now have to issue a separate order, before issuing a sentence, on the request for "immediate" release made by the defense lawyer, Sylvia Córdoba, who has requested an acquittal.
In his opinion, the fundamental rights of his defendants have been violated during the process, since the arrest last summer, while the evidence presented by the Police is "acts of blind faith."
In his opinion, they do not provide "legal evidence", and he has requested the annulment of the expert evidence and that the witnesses be discarded.
Both the prosecutor and the insurer have maintained their requests for a prison sentence of 4.5 and 5 years, respectively, in their final conclusions.
The public prosecution has reduced the compensation to 753,454 euros for the insurer, the amount assessed by the interested party. "Where are the bottles I wonder, if I am the thief, I would like to know where they are," Dumitri said.
The defendant has said that there is no evidence and has exposed the "inconsistencies" of the story about whether the robbery had been commissioned or they wanted to exchange the bottles for a car.
"It blows my mind to think that a five-star and two-Michelin-star hotel, which has such a high-level cellar, with historic wines, doesn't have surveillance cameras," he declared.
"There is no need to talk about what has happened in there or not -he added-; a home insurance immediately tells you to put cameras here and here to be able, the day they rob you, to return what they have stolen from you".
His lawyer has tried to dismantle the evidence of the experts who have appeared today, starting with the DNA remains of the two defendants found in the toilet of room 107 of Atrio, which, for Córdoba, do not place them in the place.
Regarding facial identification, he recalled that he did not get hold of the images from the security cameras because they were not of sufficient quality to "issue any judgment", as the heads of the Scientific Police have assured today.
"45 bottles do not fit in two sports bags and four towels, neither for space nor for the lightness with which that man carries them," the defense lawyer pointed out regarding what is seen in the security images.
He has also questioned that the appraiser hired by the insurer was an expert in wines, as he has said, who valued those stolen at 753,454.45 euros, according to the report made in February 2022 and now provided, without the invoices for the bottles, bought around the year 2000 by Atrio.
In this sense, the insurer's lawyer, a civil plaintiff in the case, Rafael Montes, has asked why the defense did not make its own appraisal and has argued that the expert has technical and practical knowledge after 25 years as an appraiser.
Regarding the accusation's account, he has assured that there are doubts as to how the winery was accessed, without cameras inside, only in the attached tasting room, since "there is no recording of when the person seen in the room enters" the images, so the door "could have been open", he said.
The lawyer recalled that this is how the sommelier found it the next day, so there would no longer be talk of a robbery but of a theft.
In addition, he has expressed that "by chance" some friends of the owners occupied room 106, whose key was used before the teacher to try to open the warehouse, according to the account of the Public Ministry.
For her part, the prosecutor in the case has pointed out that, although there is no "direct evidence", the circumstantial evidence "proves that the accused are the perpetrators of the crime", since it has been shown, in her opinion, that the thieves stayed in 107 and these were the defendants.
Thus, he attributes to them the authorship of a crime of robbery with force with two aggravating factors related to the monetary value and the historical value of the 45 bottles of wine.
