Pablo Garcia Rivas was sent down for 1,721 years for 80 counts of rape, but only ended up doing 17 years before being released – now he’s behind bars again.

Within a period of just under two years in the early 90’s, 45-year-old Garcia Rivas attacked and raped 74 women in the block entrances to their flats. On at least 20 occasions he had an accomplice, Antonio Barroso, a security guard by profession, who was also jailed.

Many of his victim’s noted that the attacker had grimy finger nails (he worked as a mechanic), which helped the police to track him down.

Garcia Rivas was sentenced and jailed in 1996 for a staggering amount of years but under Spain’s arguably lenient penitentiary system, no matter how many years you are sentenced to, the maximum prison sentence is 20 years, which are also subject to reduction, hence Garcia’s relatively early release.

The Spanish Government of the time, conscious of public outrage over the system, brought out the Parot Act which enables the judicial system to extend the maximum serviceable sentence past the 20-year mark for cases of terrorism or ones of the Garcia Rivas nature. The trouble is, Spain began applying it retroactively – a big no-no in normal democracies – which eventually led to European Court clamping down on Spain’s judicial irregularities.

Before this European rebuke, a Spanish judge, applying the Parot Act, extended Garcia’s sentence by ten years to keep him behind bars – this was eventually revoked and Garcia was released, as originally scheduled after only 17 years of his thousand-odd sentence.

The release took place despite warnings from psychiatric authorities that Garcia was far from ‘reformed’ or ‘repentant.’ And their concern was proven well grounded and prophetic.

Soon after release he disappeared off the radar – in Spain, once you’ve ‘paid your debt to society,’ keeping a tab on a sex offender is sometimes sketchy, to say the least.

Only eleven months after his release the Guardia Civil received complaints from two women concerning a physiotherapist who had ordered them to strip completely naked, no matter where their injury, and carried out sexually motivated explorations.

It turns out that Garcia under the false identity of ‘Carlos Uribe’ was masquerading as the said physiotherapist… He was arrested and returned to jail.

Editorial comment: Very long winded, admittedly, but without the full story the article would not have made much sense.

(News: Spain)