Maldonado prosecutor Ana Dean requested 120 days of preventive detention for former Peñarol player Nicolás Schiappacasse, according to what they told The Observer based on research sources.
Schiappacasse was arrested this Wednesday when he was on his way with three people to see the classic between Nacional and Peñarol at the Domingo Burgueño Miguel Maldonado Stadium with a loaded 9-millimeter weapon in his clothes. The police stopped the player at a roadblock 13 kilometers from Maldonado, on Route 9. The player told the police that he was carrying this weapon for a bar in Peñarol that he did not know.
The soccer player’s lawyer, Rafael García, reported at a press conference this Thursday prior to declaring before prosecutor Dean that the weapon had been reported stolen and the player did not have the bearing and possession of weapons. García assured that the player felt “very distressed” by the outcome of the case. The other three people who accompanied him, two women and a man, were released, prosecutor Ana Dean confirmed to The Observer.
Schiappacasse was close to signing a contract with Peñarol, a club where he was throughout 2021, but was injured for much of the year. The president of Peñarol, Ignacio Ruglio, said after the end of the match between Nacional and Peñarol that “if things are as described, the player will not return to Peñarol.”
Regarding the case, the court prosecutor, Juan Gómez, said that it was not “good thing” that the conversations between Schiappacasse and the police be leaked, because it means a “dissemination contrary to the law” that “what a defendant declared before an administrative authority has been known, without even reaching the Prosecutor’s Office.”
From the government, the soccer player’s situation also generated repercussions: the National Secretary of Sports, Sebastián Bauzá, described Schiappacasse’s actions as “regrettable”, requested an “exemplary sanction”, and ruled that “This type of player has no place in Uruguayan football.”
