This Wednesday the trial begins against the eight businessmen and six pimps from the Region of Murcia involved in a prostitution ring with minors. All the defendants knew that the victims, who were between 14 and 17 years old at the time, had not reached the age of majority, according to the indictment. The conspiracy was discovered in 2014 and the victims had to wait a decade for the trial to begin. During this time, the motion of censure against Mariano Rajoy took place, the United Kingdom ceased to be part of the European Union and the world experienced the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown.
Among the clients on trial for using this network of minors are renowned businessmen from the region, JC, a real estate developer and former vice president of the Confederation of Business Organizations of Cartagena, who left his position in 2014 when the conspiracy was discovered. Members of a law firm are also implicated, who requested that girls be brought to their office.
The businessmen face prison sentences of four to 24 years. For the pimps, they are seeking between 21 and 56 years in prison for alleged crimes of child prostitution. Others, alleged to be necessary collaborators in the sexual exploitation of the girls, face sentences of six and 36 years.
According to the newspaper La Verdad, the parties are negotiating a possible compliance agreement that would involve a reduction in the prison sentences incurred by the accused but that would imply, in any case, an acknowledgement of the facts. This agreement, if confirmed this Wednesday, would allow the trial to be avoided.
The defendants were not only aware that they were hiring girls, but they were also deliberately soliciting them. In their letter, the prosecution says that one of the defendants, nicknamed “El Petrolero,” always asked for “young and new girls to have sex with them.” According to the prosecution, one of the victims was forced to lie about his age: “To say that he was even younger than he was, that is, to say that he was 15 or 16 years old, because that gave the clients more time. “morbid.”
They caught them in clubs and schools
The pimps created an entire exploitation network where they demanded images of themselves in certain poses from minors, which they then included in a catalogue. In total, there were photos of more than 400 people, including the images of the twelve girls who were released. “They captured girls at the doors of juvenile clubs and even schools, some from broken families and others in situations of need and vulnerability,” details the indictment of the prosecution, to which this newspaper had access.
The document explains how the organizers of this network deceived young women by promising them “a lot of money” in exchange for positions as masseuses, always with the aim of introducing them to their profession of offering sexual services to the elderly. Of the amount received by the pimps, the victims received only a little more than a third.
“I had met her in a nightclub where there were many underage girls, in the evening, from five to ten o’clock in the evening, in order to get her to prostitute herself for her, without her having ever considered this possibility before,” he says. The prosecution reports one of the captures.
In addition to the people involved in recruiting the girls, the network also had a home that gave up the rooms where this exploitation of children took place in exchange for a share of the profits. Four furtive taxi drivers, also arrested, moved them around the capital of Segura, between private apartments and guesthouses.
