Former Brazilian soccer player Robinho spent his first night in prison in Brazil, serving a nine-year sentence for gang rape issued in Italy in 2017, prison authorities reported on Friday.
Robinho “entered this Friday, 22, around 1 am, the Penitentiary II ‘Dr. José Augusto César Salgado’ in Tremembé”, about 150 km from the city of Sao Paulo (southeast), the São Paulo state prison administration said in an email to AFP.
The 40-year-old former striker will serve a “10-day observation regime in a 2-meter by 4-meter cell”. Although the place has a capacity for two people, “currently” he is alone, the entity said in another note.
He will be able to receive family visits once this period is over, which is part of the “inclusion process” into the penitentiary system, during which he is given a basic personal hygiene kit, in addition to the prison uniform.
The Tremembé prison is known as the “prison of the famous” in Brazil, because different personalities or perpetrators of high-profile crimes have served their sentences in its facilities.
Penitentiary II has a built area of more than 8,400 square meters and a total capacity for 584 inmates, although as of Wednesday there were 434, according to the prison administration.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was set to be transferred to this site in August 2019 amid investigations and a corruption conviction handed down when he was out of power.
But his transfer was suspended by the Supreme Court and two years later he was acquitted. Unlike many Brazilian prisons, the Tremembé prison is not dominated by organized crime gangs, according to researchers.
Robinho was arrested on Thursday by the Federal Police in the port city of Santos, where he resided. The former striker of the ‘Seleção’ and Real Madrid, among other clubs, was convicted in Italy of gang-raping a young Albanian woman in a Milan nightclub in 2013 when he was an AC Milan player. The sentence was upheld in 2022.
On Wednesday, Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice ruled that the former player should serve his sentence in his home country, as requested by the Italian authorities, since the Latin American giant does not extradite its citizens.
