In the Enrique and Félix de Diego potato store in Pinto (Madrid), four men operate the packaging machine that groups the tubers in mesh bags. Right here, between potatoes, onions and pallets, Edinson worked. He arrived at 7.30 in the morning, stopped to eat a plate of rice with meat that was brought from home, took a nap on the floor and at 19.30 he returned home. Until one day, on July 10, he disappeared.
"If I do not return, they have arrested me and deported me to Canada, where I am claimed," he told his colleague Eduardo. At least Canadian prisons are not bad ...
And it vanished. "We took him for dead," says the store manager. "We thought he was in drugs," adds Eduardo. But no. The missing person is not dead or has been the victim of an adjustment of accounts . Chronicle gives them the news: Edinson - a 53-year-old Colombian; "Serious," "discreet," "polite," and "helpful," they added - he had a hidden life that has taken him to prison. Slim, around 1.80 meters tall, with thin glasses and prominent dentures, in his inseparable black backpack hid a cell phone with which in the last year he has recorded at least 555 girls and women below the skirt and without his consent in the subway, on the train, on the street, in supermarkets ... and then spread them on a pornographic website under the name of Edinson66 (probably for his year of birth). For a year, Madrid became a gigantic set for its perversion.
The National Police has not hesitated to describe him as "one of the greatest predators of women's privacy." Because it was compulsive. I practically did nothing else day after day. Record, record and record. Especially in their journeys to and from the warehouse, but also in their free time.
His profile responds to that of an obsessive person, since, according to police inquiries, and although the investigation is still open, Edinson MZ does not seem to make money with his videos. And that their numbers were bulky: thanks to the 283 videos he posted in 12 months, he had achieved more than 1.3 million views and 3,519 subscribers to his profile on one of the world's best known pornographic websites.
The category with which you had to look for your videos - already removed from the internet - was upskirting: recordings below the skirt, often with a hidden camera. An upward trend in porn that is raising alarms in Asia and increasingly in Europe. In Spain it falls within the crime against intimacy, but in the United Kingdom it was not even penalized until a girl victim of upskirting started a campaign and got the approval of the so-called Voyeurism Law . According to the British standard, in force since February, those who photograph with their cell phone the part under the skirt of a woman without their approval can face up to two years in jail and, in the most serious cases, their name will be included in the Public lists of sex offenders.
THE HUNT TO 'EDINSON66'
The operation to stop Edinson started in March, when the second group of the Networks section of the Central Cybercrime Unit of the Police detected in this porn page more than 200 videos recorded in Madrid in which they saw the underwear, the Buttocks or genitals of hundreds of women. They recognized some subway station, Puerta del Sol ... And they asked the web to give them all the information about Edinson66 . The page helped. The agents identified the obsessive voyeur and began to follow him. They probably did not find answers to the question of how a person becomes such a person.
Born in La Candelaria, in the historic center of Bogotá, it is known that he arrived in Spain years ago, although his entry is not recorded, so it could be illegal. The Police do know that between 2013 and 2017 he returned to Colombia and then settled in Madrid. He had obtained the residence card and was trying to obtain Spanish nationality, but it had been denied . In the potato store he entered recommended by a former Dominican employee who had known him working for a cleaning company in Mercamadrid, where Edinson swept and helped load trucks.
Beyond work, I barely had friends or social life. Single, lonely and without a background in Spain, lived with a Colombian family in a rental apartment in the center of Usera, south of Madrid , where the Chinese and Latin American population abounds. Five days before his arrest, he moved to another rental apartment, this time for himself, about 10 minutes walking from his previous home. In both portals they say they don't know anything about him. Edinson looks like a ghost. But he had a secret and his itineraries were marked by that secret.
IN A HIDDEN POCKET
«I recorded daily», underlines Roberto Fernández Alonso, chief inspector of the Networks section of the National Police. «When I went to work, when I came back ... Sometimes I went out just to go to Puerta del Sol or Atocha, where there is always a lot of people concentration, and I recorded compulsively» I filmed all the women I could. They were 15 or 60 years old.
Her modus operandi is well appreciated in the videos that the Police recorded: Edinson sees a woman with a skirt, stands behind her and approaches her black backpack, held with one hand, at the height of the feet . The backpack has the front pocket open and inside, your mobile with the recording device activated. Thus began his particular work of art.
In three videos to which Crónica has had access, she is seen approaching with her backpack a young woman in a red dress in a car in the Madrid subway, standing behind another girl on escalators and filming in the foreground the buttocks of another woman That seems to wait for a friend while taking pictures. Sometimes he also followed women to a store. Sometimes he also recorded their faces, so that they could see who the intimate parts in question corresponded to. Thus up to 555 women. In just five days of follow-up, the agents identified 29, two of them minors. The police who followed him let him act to obtain evidence of his crime and then approached the victims to explain that they had been subjected to an illegal recording and that they could report him. All were surprised. His method seemed infallible.
And that has been his life, which is known, from July 2018 (from then the first video he posted on the analyzed website) until July 11, 2019 (when he was arrested). Not only record, because after obtaining the material was the second part: edit it. With fruition With a video editing program that he had installed on his laptop, he mounted the images to his liking. He cut some parts, put in slow motion what interested him most, added music. I mixed in one video some women with others. In his house the agents located three hard drives and the computer with dozens of gigabytes of videos.
Before stopping him in fraganti recording a girl at the Pacific station, the police had the feeling that Edinson knew he was persecuted. He looked around more than usual, changed his address ... They were about to suspend the operation. But they did not leave their astonishment, because even so the filmmaker could not stop filming. He was still with his backpack, stalking women. Day after day.
At first, when he was arrested, Edinson offered some resistance. Now he is in jail preventively. Police are still investigating the abundant material they have found in their home and that may lead to new actions. The great "predator", as presented by the Police itself, can face two types of crime: against intimacy (197.2 of the Criminal Code), for recording the private parts of other people and also disseminating it; and abuse of minors , because among their victims there are minors. For the first they could condemn him to one to four years in prison; with the second the penalty could rise to seven.
In the potato store, on the eve of his arrest, Edinson confessed to a partner that he suspected something. Although he didn't tell his secret. He told him what they were looking for in Canada. Also that there were two children there. Police now investigate their past both in Colombia and in Canada.
In Spain, at least, Edinson66 has already left its mark. Until now, isolated cases of men who had hidden cameras in the locker rooms of El Corte Inglés or in the toilet paper holder of a bar were known. But not that they devoted all their free time to the obsession of upskirting until filming more than half a thousand women. "They didn't realize it," he told the police.
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Know more- National Police
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