Beauty clinic’s dirty secret discovered
Images were principally of women and teenage girls
A COUPLE who ran a beauty clinic in Elda have been arrested for filming their patients while they were undergoing treatment naked, and for producing child pornography.
A National Police spokesman said they have identified 83 victims, some of them minors.
The investigation came about when the US Embassy in Madrid reported that several files which showed minors being subjected to sexual abuse had been uploaded to a website by a user from an internet connection in Spain, he explained.
When officers searched the home of the person the connection was registered to, they found a large quantity of files related to sexual exploitation of minors, ‘some of which were particularly degrading for the victims’, noted the spokesman.
They also found three hard drives containing more than
500 recordings which had been made using hidden cameras.
These were principally of women and teenage girls who had gone to the clinic for pubic hair removal and had been secretly recorded during the procedures while they were naked
from the waist down.
Various pieces of electronic equipment were taken away from the house for forensic analysis to determine the extent of the couple’s involvement.
The room at the clinic where the recordings were made had one video camera hidden in a ventilation grille on the ceiling to provide an overhead view, and another disguised as a pen which was placed as close as possible to the customer on the bed to give a full frontal view without them realising.
The files, which were each about five hours long, also showed that some of the victims had been subjected to physical sexual abuse, using the excuse that it was a necessary part of the treatment.
The recordings dated back as far as 2012, when the woman started to work in the clinic, as well as other customers who were treated in the couple’s own home when the clinic closed.
The couple are both accused of discovering and revealing secrets, and the man also faces charges of possession and distribution of child pornography.