The defendant accused of downloading and sharing videos of child sexual abuse has admitted the facts and has accepted a two-year prison sentence, which has also been established that he will not serve.
Initially, the Prosecutor's Office requested 7 years in prison for this resident of Haría for a crime related to prostitution and corruption of minors, but they have reached a settlement agreement reducing the sentence, since the mitigating circumstance of undue delays has also been applied. And, as has been revealed, the case was paralyzed for almost three years.
The agreement has been ratified this Monday before the Provincial Court of Las Palmas, so the trial has not been held. "The truth is that I have not understood everything well," the defendant responded, after the president of Section Sixth of the Provincial Court, who on this occasion has not traveled to the island but has intervened by videoconference, asked him if he recognized the facts of which he was accused. "Yes, I agree," the defendant said immediately afterwards, stating that he also accepted the penalty imposed on him.
In addition to two years in prison, Antonio Virgilio O.H. has been imposed the penalty of special disqualification for five years for any profession that involves contact with children. In addition, it has been agreed that he be imposed the measure of supervised release, consisting of the prohibition of any activity that involves having minors under his care or custody or contact with them for five years and participation in sexual education programs for pedophiles.
Regarding the custodial sentence, after the defense lawyer requested it, its suspension has been agreed for a period of three years. Thus, the defendant will not enter prison although, yes, as long as he complies with the supervised release measures and does not approach any place frequented by minors.
More than a million files of pedophile content
Antonio Virgilio O.H. was arrested in January 2017, following an investigation by the Technological Investigation team of the Civil Guard, who became aware of an exchange of files of pedophile content over the Internet, managing to identify the IP of this user.
“He downloaded 34 explicit files of child sexual abuse that constitute videos of unequivocal child pornographic content, which have been available to an indefinite number of users through the Edonkey Network,” was stated in the Prosecutor's Office's indictment, which has been accepted by the defendant.
In addition, in a search of his home, agents found many other files of children without clothes or in explicit sexual attitudes. Only on an external hard drive did he have more than a million files of pedophile content, in addition to other photos and videos that he kept on several pen drives.
In those files, some girls as young as 7 years old appeared naked, while others, between 10 and 14 years old, were seen masturbating. There were also dozens of images focused “on the female genitals of the girls”. “The acts were carried out by the defendant knowing that each time he started downloading a file from said platform, he became a server for others of the part of the computer file that was being downloaded, making the file in question available to any user of the eMule program, so that an indeterminate number of people have been able to access, view or store some of the aforementioned images,” the Prosecutor's Office maintained, which considered that the defendant “carried out such acts moved by his sexual attraction towards minors”.