JAEN, Oct. 27 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Prosecutor’s Office has requested 14 years in prison for a 38-year-old soldier accused of raping his first cousin for seven years since she was nine years old and for seven consecutive years. The Second Section of the Jaén Court has been in charge of prosecuting this case in which the accused has denied everything, while the young woman, now 20 years old, has recounted for an hour multiple episodes of sexual assault that led her to a suicide attempt when he was only nine years old.
“Everything is a lie,” said the defendant to questions from the Public Prosecutor, while at the same time attributing the complaint that the young woman ended up filing against him to alleged jealousy. The defendant is also awaiting another trial for alleged sexual abuse of a nine-year-old minor, the daughter of his former romantic partner.
In his statement, he insisted that “nothing” of what was reported in the complaint “has actually happened” and he stressed how he was going to do something like that in order, as it has finally happened, to lose the support of his family, and have a file open that will deprive him of his military status, and therefore of his job, if he is finally convicted.
For her part, the young woman, protected by a screen that separated her from the accused, has faced more than an hour of interrogation in which she has given details of the sexual assaults she suffered since she was nine years old.
“You are mine and I am going to be yours” or “I am going to be the first and the last” are some of the phrases that the accused allegedly uttered and that left a mark on a nine-year-old girl who, eleven years later, has reported that she felt “guilty” and “disgusted” with herself because she did not understand that her cousin “who was so good in everyone’s eyes” was capable of doing what made her “feel so bad”.
She has narrated how neither her crying nor her rejection served to stop him and that she did not say anything out of fear and because he told her that if she spoke it was her family that would lose. Thus he endured seven years until finally in April 2021 he filed the complaint so that “he cannot do to other people what he did to me.”
“I deserve to be happy,” said the young woman, after telling how difficult it has been to put words to what was happening to her and years of psychological treatment to understand that she was not to blame for anything and that she continued to pretend that nothing was happening with the accused for fear that her sisters would realize what happened when they went out with the accused and left her to sleep at her uncle’s house, where the partying normally ended and where the vast majority of the attacks took place.
In addition to the 14 years in prison for a continued crime of sexual assault, the Public Ministry demands that the accused compensate the young woman in 30,000 euros, while the private prosecution raises the request for sentences to 15 years in prison and shares with the Prosecutor’s Office the amount claimed for civil liability. For its part, the defense has advocated the free acquittal of the accused.
