For years he managed to deceive various football clubs at home and abroad, but Lady Justice has now sidelined Bernio Jordan Enzo V. from Tilburg for the time being. The 30-year-old former ghost footballer has been sentenced to nine years in prison by the court in Breda. V. received this sentence for his part in two home robberies and one attempted robbery.
In 2019, Bernio managed to secure a contract with four professional football clubs in four different countries as a mediocre amateur football player. But just as often he disappeared without taking action. Sometimes for dubious reasons. The born Surinamese was registered by associations in Moldova, South Africa and Chile, among others. This also happened in Denmark where he went to jail for fraud.
In the summer of 2021, Bernio showed up in Colombia. As a top football player, he thought he could make use of expensive hotels, apartments, boats, restaurants and prostitutes. But the police could do nothing against him because no report had been filed. The Public Prosecution Service (OM) in our country would then have offered a helping hand.
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The Public Prosecution Service may have been looking for him, because Bernio was suspected of two home robberies in Lieshout and Tilburg and an attempted robbery in Tilburg. These were committed at the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021. Victims were robbed of bank cards, IDs and money, among other things. The perpetrators, Bernio did not commit the robberies alone, terrified the residents of the robbed houses with, among other things, an axe, a knife and a gun.
On suspicion of this, Bernio was locked up in a Colombian prison in June. At the end of last year he was extradited to our country from the South American country. Two weeks ago, the footballing criminal, or criminal footballer, finally stood before the judge in Breda.
His lawyer tried in vain to pin the blame on the co-suspects. He used his client’s stay in a Colombian prison to change the minds of the public prosecutor and the court. Because Bernio was in custody, he was an easy scapegoat in the eyes of his counselor. And that was unjustified, because Bernio would not have been involved in the preparations for, for example, the home robbery of December 2020 in Lieshout. A resident was tied up and deprived of his liberty for eight hours.
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Bernio further claimed that he had an alibi for the two days in February when he allegedly had something to do with the home invasion and attempted robbery in Tilburg. He was abroad at the time, he said. When investigation showed that this was not possible, he said that he must have been with his sister or mother at the time.
The court did not fall for these feints and determined that all three ‘serious facts’ can be proven. Bernio was deeply blamed for targeting victims in their own homes. But because the legal proceedings took so long, the final sentence was somewhat lower than demanded (eleven years). The court decided on a nine-year prison sentence. The judge also took into account the poor conditions under which Bernio was held in Colombia and further determined that the pre-trial detention of almost 3.5 years will be deducted from the prison sentence. Bernio was also obliged to pay two victims 2,000 euros in compensation each.
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