Witnesses also corner Daniel Alves, in provisional prison for an alleged rape carried out on the night of December 30 in a nightclub in Barcelona. Specifically, the victim’s friend’s statement was also taken into account by the judge when determining the footballer’s imprisonment.
According to the Catalan newspaper The vanguard“during the last month, the police of the Unit Against Sexual Assaults (UCAS) of the Mossos d’Esquadra have updated you [a la jueza] of all the news of the case, in addition to collecting the account of dozens of people who were on the night of December 30 at the Sutton nightclub.
Specifically, the aforementioned newspaper highlights the two women who were with the victim that night. His cousin and a friend. The latter denounced that she herself had also suffered violent touching in her private parts. A statement that coincides with that of the victim: “It was when I realized how I touched my friends and how attached I was to them.”
This Tuesday it became known that the prestigious criminal lawyer Christopher Martell will defend the former Barça player together with the lawyer Miraida Puente Wilson. As reported by the lawyer in a statement on Tuesday, after the judge’s decision to send him to prison without bail, Alves wanted to “strengthen” his defense with a specialist in criminal law, for which he has chosen the firm he runs Christopher Martell.
Martell is one of the most reputable lawyers in Barcelona and, as such, leads the former president of the Generalitat Jordi Pujol and his family in the case of alleged corruption that the National Court has in its hands and has also represented the footballer Leo Messi in his litigation for tax fraud, in addition to dealing with many other cases related to economic crimes.
Miraida Puente, who advises Alves in his different companies and commercial activities, was the lawyer who assisted him in his arrest last Friday and his statement before the investigating judge, who after the appearance agreed to send him to preventive detention, without bail.
In her statement, the lawyer recalls that she assisted the footballer “as soon as different media outlets announced the existence of the legal case and its specific purpose, assisting with the police force and the court itself to the volunteer made available to Dani Alves”.
The footballer, the statement emphasizes, was abroad and, through the lawyer, offered to “give a statement and defend his innocence.”
However, “the development of events and the deprivation of liberty suffered” have led Alves and the lawyer to “strengthen” your defense with a specialist in criminal law, who, the statement added, “will collaborate” with Miraida Puente in the investigation and eventual trial of Alves, to “restore his honor and dignity and, in short, demonstrate his innocence of the facts that are imputed to him “.
The trap of the Mossos to Dani Alves
On the night of Monday, January 2, at the offices of the Central Unit for Sexual Assaults (UCAS) of the Mossos d’Esquadra in the Les Corts neighborhood of Barcelona, several agents, most of them women with more than recognized police careers, began to weave a plan to try to put behind bars a still planetary soccer icon.
The Catalan uniformed men knew that their reputation was at stake and, if everything went wrong, even a degradation or change of assignment. They played with fire. But no one present backed down. Only minutes before they had heard the “consistent, detailed and seamless” account of a girl who claimed that she had been raped and beaten by Daniel Alves in a bathroom in a nightclub in Barcelona on the night of December 30, barely a kilometer and a half Diagonal above that police station.
In the first week of the year, the conviction that the girl was not lying took hold. The cameras in the Sutton room confirmed each of the ends of the victim’s statement. And, most importantly, all the witnesses who spent those days at the police station ratified 100% his version. The alleged victim, in addition to delivering that day’s dress for the extraction of evidence, had been able to neatly describe the tattoos that her attacker wore in her groin.
His cousin and her friend, the two girls who accompanied him that night, insisted on the player’s sexually aggressive attitude from the first moment, to the point that the friend denounced that Alves tried to touch her crotch on several occasions. The waiter He confirmed to the police the soccer player’s insistence on inviting the girls… the Sutton goalkeeper, the room manager, the nightclub owner… not a contradiction.
In the kings week, Still in full vacation and with a good part of the headquarters of the body out of service, a decision had to be made. The police station at 319 Travessera de les Corts was bustling. After some informal contacts with the Prosecutor’s Office, two of the commanders of the elite Mossos anti-rape unit decided that the (dis)information had to start flowing immediately for the ‘trap’ to take effect. The ‘bird’ had already flown (they were aware that on Tuesday the 3rd the ‘target’ had already returned to Mexico) and now it was a matter of returning to the cage “for good”, because “for bad” was going to be “totally impossible”, according to sources very close to the operation.
The data that was going to be leaked (no letterhead communications) was only going to be what the UCAS was interested in: yes, it was true, there was a complaint against Dani Alves for allegedly touching a girl under the skirt, but nothing more. The slogan was to make it clear that it was “more of the same” and that the Mossos practically despised that girl’s statement of 23 years who claimed that the ‘star’ had abused her.
The hoaxes played in favor of the extremely risky bet of the Mossos. Shortly after the complaint was made public (and without police intervention) the hoax began to spread on various networks and supposed information portals that the security cameras confirmed that Alves and the girl had barely met in the bathroom of the disco. 47 seconds, a time margin that further minimized the complaint. Not even police intervention had been necessary. News fakes they had done all the work. In that environment, the January 5 Alves himself, in a video sent to Antena 3, denied everything: he had not met the woman nor did he know her. Nothing at all.
With this smell of a closed case that the UCAS mossos longed for, now they saw a “remote opportunity” to put Alves in shackles. But the Brazilian had to return to Spain.
The issue rose very high and on Monday, January 9, still without having digested the shortbread, at the Catalan police headquarters “they ran into the brown.” At the Complex Central dels Mossos d’Esquadra in Sabadell, from the beginning they saw clearly that the route of extradition or surrender was never going to prosper. If Alves was still in Mexico, where he lived until last week as a player for Los cougars of the DF, the extradition was going to be very painful according to the obsolete treaty of 1978, although not impossible. But it was going to be much worse if the player went to his native Brazil. Once there, article 5 of the Federal Constitution shields any national, not naturalized, from being handed over to a third country, even if extradition agreements have been closed, as is the case of Spain and Brazil, which did so in 1988. .
The logical conclusion of UCAS is that only by returning voluntarily would they have a chance to stop him.. And a misfortune played in favor of the investigators. On January 13, the mother of his wife, Joana Sanz from Tenerife, María del Carmen Sanz, died.
The footballer announced his intention to return to Spain for the funeral of his mother-in-law. And that’s where the UCAS agents intervened. The Mossos contacted what until now was the sole legal representative of the athlete in Spain, the lawyer Miraida Puente Wilson, who introduces herself as a “specialist in immigration, visa procedures, senior managers, investors, and students”, but who is a true unknown in the field Penal.
The offer from the Mossos was little more than a kind of explanatory meeting taking advantage of the return of Alves for the funeral. It was only a matter of explaining himself by the complaint for “alleged touching.” An informal meeting - they implied - to “shelf” the case.
At first Puente was reluctant. Also Alves. But both -according to sources from the investigation- ended up accepting the meeting when the Mossos insisted that if the player did not show up for the appointment, little less than he was going to lead the Investigating Court 15 of Barcelona to issue an international search and capture order, with the consequent worldwide scandal and, furthermore, putting all kinds of obstacles to the player’s international movements.
In the end, Alves traveled to attend his mother-in-law’s funeral and agreed to meet with the Mossos, who have discreetly followed his trail ever since he set foot in Barcelona. But there was no talk. Last Friday morning, as soon as the agents visually confirmed that it was the athlete who was accompanying the lawyer to the appointment, they shackled him, read him his rights and took him to judicial cells, without even questioning him before, once he declared himself innocent. They wanted the Prosecutor’s Office and Judge Anna Marín to see for themselves the inconsistencies in the player’s story.
No prior preparation
And that also went well for the Mossos. Alves in court gave up to three different versions of what happened: from not knowing the girl at all, going through a brief temporary coincidence in the bathroom, to ending with consensual sex. Obviously, he had not prepared a statement with his lawyer at all. Neither in his head nor in his lawyer’s head did the idea of ending up accused, much less arrested, ever occur.
