An Italian man who was found guilty of deliberately infecting 32 women with HIV got 24 years in jail, The Guardian reported.
Accountant Valentino Talluto, 33, used the Internet to woo the women for more than 10 years, eventually having unprotected sex with them without informing them that he had the virus, the newspaper noted.
Authorities said they believed Talluto had sex with 53 women total with 32 of them being diagnosed with the disease, The Guardian said. Male partners of three of the women infected, came down with the virus afterward, the newspaper added.
Talluto was arrested in 2015 and the ruling by the Italian court ended his trial that had started in March in Rome's Rebibbia prison, according to Agence France-Presse. His alleged victims ranged in age from 14 to women in their 40s, The Guardian reported.
"Talluto has never cooperated, he has made false statements, he has always denied any responsibility, even in the face of the evidence," prosecutor Elena Neri told the court last month, according to AFP. "His actions were intended to sow death."
Talluto's attorneys described their client as a man "eagar for affection" and that his mother was a drug addict who contracted HIV, AFP reported.
"He did not intentionally seek to transmit the virus," lawyer Maurizio Barca told the court, arguing that Talluto used condoms "most of the time" and only had sex without them a few times after being "caught in the heat of the action," AFP reported.
Talluto argued last month that he had become close to the women he had sex with and he purely wanted to infect them, he would have not tried to establish relationships with them, AFP wrote.
"Many of the girls know my friends and family," Talluto said in September, per the news service. "They say that I wanted to infect as many people as possible. If that had been the case, I would have gone for casual sex in bars, I would not have brought them into my life."