This Tuesday, the Court of Bizkaia sentenced six of the seven defendants in the case held last January to terms of between 10 and 20 years in prison, for brutally attacking the young Alexandru, who has been in a vegetative state since then.
In the ruling, the court has considered it proven that in the early hours of July 25, 2021 in Amorebieta, the seven defendants “met by mutual agreement” and with “the intention of ending their lives or imagining that possibility,” along with other minors of age already convicted for their involvement in the beating, they cornered and attacked the victim until he left her in a coma.
According to the Biscayan Court, the youth gang known as ‘The Koala Brothers’ beat him in a “coordinated manner”, hitting him with various objects and kicking him until the young man was lying on the ground “with a large hemorrhage on his head.” , without the victim having the possibility of defense.
Furthermore, the judicial resolution indicates that the “essential” evidence in this case is a video of the attack that one of the members of the group spread on social networks and that has allowed us to directly observe what happened, which it describes as a “lynching.” .
In the case, the court has charged five of the defendants with the crime of attempted murder with membership in a criminal group. That is why he has sentenced four of them to 20 years in prison and the fifth to 14 years in prison, after applying the mitigating circumstance of mental alteration or anomaly.
Likewise, the Court has sentenced the sixth defendant of being an accessory to the crime of attempted murder with membership in a criminal group and, therefore, he is sentenced to 10 years in prison. Finally, the seventh defendant has been accused of a crime of omission of the duty to help, since together with the rest he abandoned the badly injured victim, and for this he must pay a fine of 10 euros per day for twelve months to the victim.
In addition to the prison sentences, the six convicted men must pay the victim 1,071,000 euros in compensation, plus 20,000 euros to each of their parents. On the other hand, they have been prohibited from approaching the victim or her parents within 500 meters for 10 years.
For this same attack, last June the Court of Bizkaia confirmed the sentences of between 3 and 5 years of closed confinement to six other young minors to whom a Bilbao juvenile court had sentenced them.
The family of Alex, the victim, has shown their satisfaction with the sentence handed down by the Bizkaia Court to the accused. She considers that a lesser sentence “would not have been fair” given “the severity of the damage that she has suffered and that she will suffer from now on as well.”
The lawyer for the victim’s family, Mariana Tulbure, explained to the media that they have received the resolution “with quite a lot of nerves” and consider that “it has gone very well.” As she has indicated, “less than what we have achieved would not have been fair.”
On the other hand, the young man’s mother is “very happy”, but although the sentence alleviates the family’s pain “a little”, she stated that “what they have done to Alex cannot be repaid with or with prison, not with money, not with anything.” Furthermore, she believes that the request for forgiveness that five of the defendants made on the last day of the trial was not “from the heart.”
