The top court in Spain’s Catalonia region on Friday overturned Brazilian soccer player Dani Alves’ rape conviction, saying the case against him had inconsistencies and contradictions.

The 41-year-old defender was convicted last year of raping a woman in the restroom of a Barcelona nightclub in 2022 and sentenced to 4-1/2 years in prison.

“Dani Alves is very happy. He is innocent, that is demonstrated. Justice has spoken,” Ines Guardiola, lawyer for the former Barcelona, PSG and Juventus player, told RAC1 radio.

The case has gripped Spain where women’s rights have become a highly sensitive national topic, especially in the sports world after the scandal over former soccer chief Luis Rubiales’ unwanted kissing of national team player Jenni Hermoso in 2023.

In its unanimous appeal ruling, the four-judge Catalan high court said the accuser’s testimony lacked reliability over facts that could be objectively verified through video, “explicitly indicating that what she recounted does not correspond to reality”.

“The inadequacies of the evidence lead to the conclusion that the standard required by the presumption of innocence has not been met,” it said, noting “a series of gaps, inaccuracies, inconsistencies and contradictions concerning the facts, the legal assessment and its consequences”.

The accuser’s lawyer, Ester Garcia, told reporters she would appeal the decision before Spain’s Supreme Court, which could take a year to be resolved. She said the process was emotionally taxing for her client due to the intense media attention on the case.

The regional prosecutor’s office declined to comment on the ruling.

Alves had already been released from prison on a 1 million euro ($1.1 million) bail while awaiting the appeal. Now he is free to leave Spain after the court overturned a travel ban, restraining order and compensation payment.

The court said that the alleged victim’s argument that she went with Alves into the restroom for fear that his friends might follow them did not appear reasonable, concluding that she instead “voluntarily went to the bathroom area for the purpose of being with the defendant in a more intimate space”.

It added that CCTV footage did not allow to infer whether she consented to the subsequent interaction or not.

REACTIONS

While some Spaniards said the judges should be trusted, others expressed unease with the ruling and its potential implications for women accusing men of power.

Justice Minister Felix Bolanos said the ruling must be respected and he could not separately assess facts already reviewed by judges. But he added: “Spanish society no longer tolerates sexist vexatious behaviour and women are losing their fear and denouncing it.”

Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Diaz, however, came out in solidarity with Alves’ accuser, whose identity has not been made public. “All my support to the victim. I’m concerned about the re-victimisation of the victim, who is suffering a lot. Justice needs to walk hand in hand with women and provide certainty and security.”

Irene Montero, who was Spain’s equality minister when Alves was first indicted, criticised the ruling as “patriarchal justice.” “Only yes means yes,” she added, referring to a legal reform she spearheaded establishing an absence of consent as a main criterion for determining sex offences.

-Reuters

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A policeman who was among the first on the scene of Diego Maradona’s death four years ago, told a court Tuesday he saw no “medical items” in the room where the football legend was receiving post-operative care at home.

Officer Lucas Farias testified in the trial of seven health professionals accused of homicide for their alleged role in what prosecutors have described as the “horror theatre” of Maradona’s final days.

Farias said he “didn’t see medical items in the room. I didn’t see serums that I think should be part of home hospitalization,” referring to an intravenous drip.

Farias was one of four police officers to give evidence Tuesday, a week after the trial opened in San Isidro in the northern suburbs of Buenos Aires.

“What first caught my attention about Diego Maradona was his face-up position with an abdomen so swollen it seemed about to explode,” said Farias.

“I was shocked to see Maradona in that state, I never thought I’d find myself faced with that image.”

Maradona died on November 25, 2020, aged 60, while recovering at home from brain surgery for a blood clot, after decades battling cocaine and alcohol addictions.

It was determined he died of heart failure and acute pulmonary edema, a condition where fluid accumulates in the lungs.

On trial are a neurosurgeon, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a medical coordinator, a nursing coordinator, a doctor and a night nurse accused of being criminally negligent in the care they provided to the footballer in his final days.

Prosecutors allege the footballer was abandoned to his fate for a “prolonged, agonizing period” before his death.

The defendants face prison terms of between eight and 25 years if convicted of “homicide with possible intent” — pursuing a course of action despite knowing it can cause death.

Nearly 120 witnesses are expected to testify in the long-delayed trial expected to run until July.

-AFP

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A 15-year-old girl opened fire in a Wisconsin school classroom in the US on Monday, fatally shooting a fellow student and a teacher and wounding six other people before killing herself with the handgun, police said.

The shooting took place in a mixed-grade study hall shortly before 11 a.m. (1700 GMT) at the Abundant Life Christian School, which has 420 students from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.

The shooter was a student at the school, identified by police as Natalie Rupnow, who also went by the name Samantha.

A second-grade student, who would generally be 7 or 8 years old, called 911 to report the shooting at the school, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes told a press conference.

“Let that soak in for a minute,” Barnes said.

The two shot dead were a teenage student and a teacher, Barnes said without identifying the victims.

Two wounded students were in critical condition with life-threatening injuries, while another teacher and three other students were wounded and expected to survive.

School shootings have been a macabre routine in the United States, with 322 of them this year, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database website. That is the second highest total of any year since 1966, according to that database – topped only by last year’s total of 349 such shootings.

Monday’s rampage was a rarity in that it was carried about by a girl. Only about 3% of all U.S. mass shootings perpetrated by females, studies show.

There was as yet no known motive for the violence.

The shooter’s parents were cooperating with the investigation, Barnes said, without revealing details of what was discussed.

“We have no reason to believe that they have committed a crime at this time,” Barnes said of the parents.

Investigators were speaking with the girl’s father at police facility, Barnes said, but not pressing him too hard because he just lost a daughter.

Asked how she got the gun, Barnes said, “Good question. How does any 15-year-old get ahold of a gun?”

At a previous press conference, Barnes lamented how the tragedy would affect Madison, the capital of Wisconsin with a population of about 270,000.

“Every child, every person in that building, is a victim, and will be a victim forever. These types of trauma don’t just go away,” Barnes said.

Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway also commented on how commonplace such violence was.

“We need to do better in our country and our community to prevent gun violence,” she said.

‘LOCKDOWN, LOCKDOWN’

The shooter arrived at school on time and pulled out the handgun about three hours into the school day, officials said.

Once the shooting began, students were locked in their classrooms and “handled themselves magnificently,” said Barbara Wiers, Abundant Life’s director of elementary and school relations.

Students practice what to do in the event of a shooting, and are normally told, “this is just a drill,” Wiers told the press conference.

“They were clearly scared … when they heard ‘lockdown, lockdown’ and nothing else they knew it was real,” Wiers said.

Students were later taken off campus to a site where all the survivors were reunited with their parents, officials said.

Gun control and school safety have become major political and social issues in the U.S. where the number of school shootings has jumped in recent years.

The gun violence epidemic has afflicted public and private schools alike in urban, suburban and rural communities.

President Joe Biden called on Congress to enact gun-control legislation to prevent further massacres. Similar calls have gone unheeded after almost every school shooting in recent memory.

“It is unacceptable that we are unable to protect our children from this scourge of gun violence. We cannot continue to accept it as normal,” Biden said in a statement.

In 2022, Biden signed into law the first major federal gun reform in three decades, about a month after an 18-year-old man opened fire at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 students and two teachers.

The Wisconsin shooting took place 12 years and two days after one of the most notorious school shootings in U.S. history: the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. A 20-year-old man armed with a semi-automatic rifle killed 20 school children plus six adults who worked at the school.

Polling shows American voters favor stronger background checks on gun buyers, temporary limits on people in crisis and more safety requirements for gun storage at homes with children. Yet political leaders have largely declined to act, citing the U.S. constitutional protection for gun owners.

-Reuters