The victim of the Igualada rape was found “half dead”

Since this Monday, the Barcelona Court has been holding the trial against Brian Raimundo Céspedes, a young Bolivian accused of having savagely raped a minor in Igualada (Barcelona), on Halloween night 2021. Céspedes sits on the bench for two crimes: assault sexual and attempted murder. The Prosecutor’s Office asks for 45 years in prison for him. The man known as the ‘Monster of Igualada’ had already sexually assaulted his 7-year-old sister and an ex-girlfriend. The accused was expected to testify in the first session of the trial, but the court has accepted the request of his defense and the alleged rapist will give his testimony at the end, this coming Friday.

The first session of the trial has reproduced, behind closed doors, the recorded statement of the victim, who has not had to attend the hearing or have to go through the hell of having to relive the rape again and having to answer the questions of the parts. Those who did give their testimony at the start of the hearing were the two truck drivers who found the victim after she was raped, next to an industrial warehouse. The girl, 16 years old when she was sexually assaulted, had gone to a party at a nightclub on the outskirts of Igualada and she was raped after saying goodbye to a boy, with whom she had had sexual relations.

It was 6 in the morning, and the girl was brutally attacked, allegedly by Céspedes, when she was going to the train station to return home. The two men who found her have revealed that she was “half dead.” “She was half-naked, trembling, half-conscious,” she said. “She was all full of blood, there was a very large puddle of blood,” said one of the two truck drivers. «I told him: now the ambulance is coming. And she said; ‘no no no'”. He raped her so brutally that he almost killed her. That is why the judge decided that she should sit on the bench for the crimes of sexual assault and attempted murder. According to her oral opening order, if she had not been found she would have died. She was attacked and raped for 20 minutes through vaginal and anal penetrations and even with objects and she received a severe blow to the head, which kept her in the ICU for two months. The victim has lost hearing in one ear. She does not remember anything about that night, nor about the following ten days, according to what she testified before the judge.

The person the victim was with before being raped has also testified. He was a boy she already knew and with whom she left the party to have sex. “I understood that she was going to go with her friends, I don’t know how she was going to return, but I understood that she was not going to return alone,” the boy said.