Key day in the trial of the case of the theft of the 45 luxurious bottles from the Atrio de Cáceres restaurant, valued at 1,648,500 euros, according to the restaurant’s menu. The two defendants, the Romanian-Dutch citizen Constantin Dumitru and the former Mexican miss Priscila Lara Guevara, have accepted their right not to testify either before the Public Prosecutor’s Office or before the private prosecution, which represents the insurer that compensated the owners of the warehouse for the film theft that occurred on October 27, 2021.
The main witnesses in the case have testified, the hotel workers where the restaurant where they dined and the winery they visited, and from where the bottles were stolen, are located, who have identified the defendants. One after another, although not in a resounding way because they all specified that the robbery occurred in a pandemic period and that the alleged perpetrators always wore the mask.
In the case of the woman, she was also completely covered, with a wig, glasses “and her hair all over her face”, as specified by the person in charge of carrying out the check-in, who has described in detail the encounter with the woman, who “I was all in black.” “I could only see her eyes, yes the memories, highly painted, with black paint,” she specified in her statement, in which she added that the signature for the hotel registration (she stayed in room 107) He did it “very slowly” but it did match the one on his ID.
In addition, he stressed that she showed up at the hotel without suitcases and only carrying a “very small” backpack. The hotel director has also identified the man considered by the Police to be the mastermind of the coup, Constantin Dumitru, due to his physical corpulence: “He was tall and strong.” He never checked into the accommodation and agreed for dinner, then going up to the room, which was for individual use, to prepare the robbery.
The defense lawyer, Sylvia Córdoba, has tried at all times to ensure that the identification made by the witnesses of the couple inside the courtroom did not have the necessary validity and has asked each of them if they were influenced by the images that they had reproduced the media of the arrested couple and also because of the possibility, denied by all of them, that the police investigating the case had shown them their photos to recognize them.
One of the two owners of the restaurant-hotel Atrio de Cáceres, José Polo, has influenced in his statement that the theft of the 45 bottles was for “commission” and has shown his willingness to negotiate with those accused by the Chateau d’Yquem of 1806 , valued at about 350,000 euros, due to its high sentimental value, although he repeated again that “I would never have sold it, it is priceless as it has a high sentimental and historical value for us.”
In this sense, he once again specified that the theft “has been a commission and I had the hope that it had not been and they would then negotiate with the bottles”, he told the media after testifying at the oral hearing at the Provincial Court of Caceres.
For the rest of the bottles, I would not negotiate directly with the thieves because they have already obtained compensation of 753,454.46 from the insurance. Of course, during the trial he has clarified that he would do it with the insurance company (Reale) if the bottles are finally recovered, of which nothing is known about their whereabouts at the moment, although Constantin Dumitru indicated in his first statement to the Police that he could have a destination in Russia because he had some contacts there.
José Polo considers that “if they do not negotiate between now and the end of the trial, it means that the bottles are held by the people who ordered them”, and that they are “dangerous”, he has specified. To questions from the defense of the defendants, the co-owner of Atrio has answered that the bottles that he has acquired at an international auction, in December 2000, cost him “between eight and seven million pesetas each”, although the exact amount is not known. I remembered her well.
Regarding the physical examination of the two accused of the robbery, Polo has not been completely sure, because he has specified that “I am not a good physiognomist” although he has said that he “had hair and was fatter than now”. In this way, he has said that “I am not one hundred percent sure, they could be”, he has said before the magistrate to questions from the prosecutor. “I only saw them at dinner, they told me that the lady had registered and that she was waiting for someone to have dinner, she had an artist friend who was sitting with them and I went up to ask them how dinner had gone,” he said. The owner of the restaurant.
Polo has defended the security measures that the warehouse had as well as the inventory, with a computer and two handwritten books that record what goes in and out of there, but he has also said that “we never thought that we were going to steal” to underline that as a result of the robbery “we had a very bad three months but we had to turn the page and that is why we reached an agreement with the insurer”.
Regarding the modus operandi of the robbery, the restaurateur has stated that it “seems” to him that after the thieves tried to open the cellar with an “old” key from room 106, they later did so with another key, the master, which is the one usually has the worker who is at night, “who closes all the doors and checks that everything is closed”.
Among the witnesses cited is also the other owner, Toño Pérez, who has shown his inability to go to court this Monday by being outside of Cáceres at a gastronomic event. The trial, after being summoned this Tuesday 23 witnesses, continues this coming Wednesday.
For the defendants, the prosecutor Carmen Barquilla requests a sentence of four years and six months in prison for both of them, whom she considers co-authors of a crime of robbery with force in a public establishment that is especially serious due to the high amount of the stolen objects.
For its part, the private prosecution, represented by the lawyer Rafael Montes, the Reale insurance company that reached an agreement with Atrio and compensated him with almost 800,000 euros, asks for the money paid and for the bottles to appear, in addition to five years in prison.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
