A 51-year-old man was sentenced to 20 years in prison for sexually abusing his daughter for 18 years in a row. The systematic abuse began when the girl was only four years old, while the child’s mother was abroad. The man was also accused of raping a classmate of the girl, when the two were 15 years old, IPN reports.

According to the Prosecutor General’s Office, the defendant began abusing his daughter in 1999. Over the years, he also started to resort to rape. Those acts ended only in 2017, when the victim told her mother that she no longer wanted to live with her father, explaining the reasons. The victim’s mother alerted police.

In 2011, the defendant also raped a 15-year-old minor, who was his daughter’s classmate.

The man was convicted of rape of a person under the age of 14, of non-consensual sexual intercourses, of rape of a minor person. He will serve his sentence in a closed penitentiary.

Prosecutors disagree with the sentence and will appeal it to ask for the harshest punishment - life imprisonment – given that the defendant abused two minors, one of them being his biological daughter, and his illegal actions lasted long and were systematic in character.