Costa News Spain Breaking News | English News in Spain.
A ‘LARGE number’ of sexual predators have been allowed to roam the streets of Spain freely after a data glitch on electronic tags prevented judicial authorities from keeping tabs on the location of offenders convicted of sexual abuse, it has been revealed.
The disclosure has sparked public outrage with calls to resign equality minister Ana Redondo. Opposition parties have claimed that Pedro Sanchez’s Socialist-led Government failed to listen when warned about potential flaws of the system over a 12 months ago.
But Redondo dismissed concerns as ‘alarmist’, adding: “The bracelets have worked at all times, there is no failure.”
Redondo, despite stating that she supports the current system in its entirety, said on Monday that an open tender will be held for a service provider who can provide stronger protections to the information collected on electronic tags.
The failure of the Spanish prosecutions has led to a number of cases collapsing, which puts at risk the protection of the law for more than 4,500 Spanish women who have restraining order.
Judges, police unions, and other law enforcement officials claim that the tags’ repeated malfunctions have resulted in the loss of vital data. These failures undermine the prosecutions made by prosecutors while letting offenders get away with their crimes.
READ MORE: British woman, 64, is arrested in Benidorm for ‘strangling her friend to death with a vacuum cleaner cable’
Insiders say that system errors range from false alarms or low battery levels to faulty geolocation. GPS signals are also prone of dropping in rural areas, where coverage is patchy.
In September 2024, a supervisor at a control centre told staff to close ‘low battery’ alerts, bypassing official protocol.
The move, say workers, meant that hundreds of alarms went unanswered.
This episode brings back memories of Pedro Sanchez’s failed 2022 Sexual Consent Law, which reduced sentences by accident for over 1,200 convicted sexual offenders.
Femicide – the killing of women and girls because of their gender – is a significant problem in Spain.
The government has released figures showing that so far in this year, 28 women were murdered by their partners or ex-partners.
Since 2003, there have been 1,322 deaths of women.
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