The Supreme Court has confirmed the 15-year prison sentence of a Romanian couple for enslaving a man with serious health problems, making him beg for 15 hours a day, without rest or food, who was sold for 400 euros and whose leg was amputated for the harshness of their situation.
The couple contacted the victim in 2016, who lived in the town of Colceag, near Bucharest, Romania, with limited economic resources and whom they convinced to travel to Spain to beg, splitting the benefits 50/50, when "he "What they intended was to use him to beg for them," according to the sentence, to which EFE has had access.
The victim, an elderly widower who had health problems having suffered frostbite to the toes of his left foot and who needed crutches to walk, agreed to travel to Spain "in the conviction that he would earn enough for his future support."
In October 2016, the three arrived in Barcelona and settled in a place in the Gràcia neighborhood where they had made a hut and slept on the floor on cardboard. The same day he arrived in Barcelona, he began to beg and the couple began to appropriate all the money they collected. They took away his crutches and bought him a wheelchair.
The woman was in charge of always taking him to the same place, around 6:30 or 7 and picking him up around 10 p.m. They seized his documentation and did not provide him with food or drinks, only a coffee with milk in the morning, and he ate from what passers-by and neighbors gave him. He had to relieve himself in a container, similar to a bottle, or in a sewer to which he crawled due to his difficulty in walking.
He remained like this for six months until his health worsened due to being exposed to extreme weather conditions, without rest, hygiene, or medical treatment, little and poorly fed to the point that two of his toes became gangrenous. Due to this, he went to Romania to receive medical attention. There, the distal half of his left foot was amputated and after that the couple, who had accompanied him on the trip, installed him in his house to use it again as soon as he was recovered.
They convinced him to return to Barcelona, where they traveled on June 14, 2017, with the promise that, this time, they would give him 50% of the profits, but they did not comply, and they kept him in the same exploitation conditions.
What's more, on an undetermined date, they sold him to another person for 400 euros, without his situation improving at all, until on August 28, 2018, the victim asked for help due to the severe pain he had in his foot and the passers-by. They called the medical services who admitted him to the San Pau Hospital. She had deteriorated to such an extent that on October 2 her left lower limb had to be amputated above the knee.
After being hospitalized for two months, he was transferred to a public care center. The couple was arrested in January 2020 in Romania pursuant to a European Arrest Warrant.
The Barcelona Court sentenced the couple to 16 years in prison for a crime of trafficking in human beings in medial competition with a crime of begging and another of serious injuries, and imposed 10 years in prison on the man to whom the couple sold the victim. for 400 euros. In addition, he established compensation of 90,000 euros.
The Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) reduced the sentences to 15 and 8 years respectively by acquitting them of the crime of begging. And now the Supreme Court ratifies the ruling of the TSJC by highlighting that the three phases of the crime of trafficking in human beings occur. The recruitment in Romania of the victim who, "given her unfortunate personal circumstances" and "the very precarious situation in which she found herself," agreed to the offer that later turned out to be a "deception."
The transfer to Spain and the subsequent exploitation to which "the convicts subjected him" made him beg from the day he arrived in Barcelona, appropriating all the victim's money, whom they "had under control" at all times.
