An inmate was charged with carrying out nine telephone extortions from prison

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An inmate from a Rosario prison was charged with making nine extortion calls in the span of a month. All the facts are classified as attempted and led to a sentence of preventive detention.

The criminal, identified as Ezequiel Rubén Torres, was accused of making nine telephone contacts with extortion intent from Penitentiary Unit 6 of the aforementioned Santa Fe city. According to judicial sources, all these attempts occurred in the month of May of this year.

The accusation was made by prosecutor Franco Carbone, who was in charge of the investigation. For his part, Florentino Malaponte, judge of the hearing, was the one who formalized the accusation and issued preventive detention for two years for Torres, detailed spokespersons for the Public Prosecutor’s Office (MPA).

According to what Carbone reported, the prisoner made the first call on May 5 at 11:19. In that contact, he tried to extort a woman in charge of the buffet at a club, “telling her that she had to pay money” so that nothing would happen to him.

That same day, Torres sent text messages to the owner of a bar, located in the center of Rosario. In the messages, the criminal demanded a cash payment from the merchant so as not to shoot up his premises. Using the telephone, the defendant carried out the same operation without success on 7 more occasions. In the calls, he tried to extort businessmen, presidents of neighborhood clubs and even a singer.

The last case was on July 3, when the criminal contacted a man who had provided his telephone number on television to raise funds, which would be allocated to a relative of his who had been the victim of an accident in his home. Through a message, Torres threatened to kill the man if he did not pay him the sum of $100,000.

Days later, the authorities discovered the telephone equipment with which the inmate carried out the extortion attempts and opened the case.

*With information from Agencia Télam