The Supreme Court has declared firm the two-year prison sentence imposed on a Barcelona firefighter who recorded with a hidden camera several colleagues from the Sant Andreu park as they changed and showered in their changing room. The judges inadmitted both the appeal of the convicted person and that of his victims and the Barcelona City Council, who requested that he also be disqualified during his sentence to hold public office. The Barcelona consistory is waiting to receive the order to reactivate the disciplinary file.
The Hearing of Lugo orders to reopen the case of the women recorded while they urinated in the Maruxaina
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The three resolutions of the case explain that the events occurred in July 2015 when this firefighter attached a hidden camera to a sink in the women’s locker room in Barcelona’s Sant Andreu park with Velcro. A hidden device with which she recorded up to 13 intimate videos of three female colleagues who changed and showered after work in those changing rooms. The camera was found by chance by one of them at the end of September.
No one had at any time any doubt who had put the camera and for what. He himself wrote to one of the victims a day later to admit that it was him: “I’m the fucking pig son of a bitch of the camera,” he said in that message. He also recognized it during the trial held in a criminal court in Barcelona. The tests would not have allowed him to say otherwise: one of the videos recorded by the camera shows how it is he who places and adjusts the device in the women’s bathroom.
Both the three victims and the Barcelona City Council brought the accusation in this case. At first the criminal court 19 of the city sentenced him to 4 and a half months in prison, in addition to being suspended from employment during the sentence. He did not have to compensate anyone because, although he had entered 9,000 euros at the beginning of the trial, the three victims waived any compensation during the process.
Their sentence grew when they and the consistory took the case before the Provincial Court of Barcelona. The judges understood that he had not committed a single crime of revealing secrets about three injured, but three autonomous crimes, and increased his sentence to two years in prison. This second sentence added a restraining order so that he could not come within a kilometer of the three victims for two years – which in practice excluded them from working again in the same fire station – but rejected another of the claims of the accusation: that he was disqualified from having a public employment.
The same argument that those affected and the Barcelona City Council have brought, without success, before the criminal chamber of the Supreme Court. They requested a disqualification conviction and the judges flatly inadmised both their resources and that of the convicted person for a formal matter: the case is two months prior to the 2015 legal reform and is, therefore, a sentence of a Provincial Court issued on appeal against one of a criminal court that cannot be appealed to the Supreme Court.
The margin has been very narrow. The instruction was sent to trial on October 6, 2015 and the legal reform that would have allowed a new review of the case came into force two months later. The result is that the firm conviction of this firefighter does not imply his mandatory entry into prison and he will be suspended for the duration of the two-year sentence established by the courts.
Now the ball is on the roof of the Barcelona City Council. As reported by municipal sources, the consistory is waiting to formally receive the order of the Supreme Court that grants firmness to the sentence to reactivate the disciplinary proceedings against the firefighter, paralyzed due to the opening of the criminal case. The firefighter, the same sources indicate, has been separated from his duties by the City Council since the outbreak of the case in 2016.
Once they receive the communication from the Supreme Court, the human resources service of the consistory will analyze if a sanction is imposed on him outside of the suspension to act as a firefighter that is already contemplated in the sentence. The aforementioned sources have avoided specifying whether they will be definitively expelled from the Fire Department and have asked to wait for the resolution of the administrative file.
Lugo, Barcelona, Zaragoza, Madrid, the CGPJ …
The firmly resolved case of this Barcelona firefighter joins others known in recent years of men convicted of using hidden cameras to secretly obtain intimate images of women, sometimes co-workers and sometimes unknown victims in public spaces. In June 2020, for example, the Supreme Court confirmed a one-year prison sentence for a mosso who recorded 17 colleagues at the Badalona police station with a hidden camera.
This January the Supreme Court has also imposed 3 years in prison on the former traffic chief of the Zaragoza Local Police for recording 9 women with a camera hidden in a pen. Previously, a national police officer assigned to the General Council of the Judiciary was sentenced to two years in prison for doing the same to obtain intimate images of several companions without their consent. Recently, a man accepted more than 40 years in prison after admitting that he had recorded hundreds of women with a hidden camera in the Madrid Metro and had uploaded the videos to a porn website.
The last known case is still under investigation in a Galician court. Dozens of women from the Lugo town of San Cibrao report having been recorded by a hidden camera placed in an alley with the aim of obtaining intimate images while urinating during the Maruxaina festival in 2019. The videos ended up on porn pages and the Provincial Court de Lugo has had to force the court to investigate the case after filing it on the grounds that they themselves had given up their privacy by urinating in the street.
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