A man from Granada has been given a one-year, suspended sentence for forging a disability parking card and displaying it on his dashboard.

However, besides the 2,700 euros he has to pay, because he has been given a jail sentence (albeit a suspended one because of its brevity) he now has a criminal record.

The Policía Municipal became suspicious concerning the authenticity of the parking certificate on the 29th of April 2019 when the car was parked in an area for people with reduced-mobility problems on Calle Doctor Azpitarte.

The driver had said that it was his mother’s whom he was visiting, but the name on the parking document was that of a male, hence, the police deciding to investigate.

Making a note of the details they passed the information onto their Forgery Investigation Section. They very soon concluded that it was a complete, colour forgery of an original document – in other words it was an unauthorised copy.

The name on the parking pass was that of the real holder so it did not coincide with the owner of the vehicle that it was being used for.

The real document holder was called as a witness in the trial where he admitted that he had given the document to the condemned man for him to place in his car as, “they would both be going in the culprit’s car to a hospital to visit the mother of one of them. It appears that the condemned man had made a full-coloured copy for the occasion.

The trial took place on the 19th of May but the lawyer of the now condemned man submitted an appeal which was finally rejected.

Editorial comment: it appears that by just using an unauthorised copy of an official document but in a fraudulent manner, even though the details within have not been altered, it’s classified as a forgery. Had the man not used it in a different car to which it had been assigned, that would have been a different story.

(News: City & Metropolitan Area, Granada, Andalucia)