A Venezuelan woman was hospitalised in Spain after claiming she had been raped and abandoned on the Camino de Santiago.It turned out that the allegations were false and that she had invented much the same story on a pilgrimage to Fátima in Portugal.
The 50-year-old Venezuelan admitted to police on February 4th, that her stories were not true and that she had suffered a psychotic outbreak.
The woman claimed to have been abducted by two men in a car, raped and abandoned naked in a rural area of the Val do Dubra, Santiago.
However, after being taken to a hospital, she stabilised and said that the story was due to mental problems she had suffered a few years ago.
The woman was found naked and lying on the ground on a particularly cold night. Vale do Dubra locals rescued her and noticed that she had suffered injuries.
When she arrived at the hospital, the doctors also identified injuries that were "compatible with sexual assault."
However, the Guardia Civil who investigated the case identified contradictions in her testimony when they analysed recordings from video surveillance cameras and collected testimonies from several witnesses.
Among these were some men who remembered being insulted by the woman, who told them, "All men are the same."
There were no false stories in Lisbon where a 19-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of raping tourists.
The Judicial Police detained the man on suspicion of rape and robbery offences that were carried out in January this year.
Three foreign victims, aged between 20 and 30, reported their ordeal to city police. According to an official statement, the women were in Portugal "on vacation or on school activities."
The suspect, who lives in Lisbon, is "familiar with places in the city where, during the night and at dawn, there often are women on their way back to their accommodation."
The young man "approached the victims unexpectedly, and with overwhelming physical violence, dragged them to quieter areas where he sexually assaulted them."
The man has been remanded in custody.
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Incidentally the Istanbul Convention about not battering women that Portugal signed up to but largely ignores, is itself taking a battering from some current East European and prospective Balkan members. Apparently a debate is raging about 'When is a Woman not a woman?'- (so its alright to slap him or it about??)