Former Brazil and Manchester City player Robinho has been arrested in Brazil to serve a nine-year prison sentence for rape.

Robinho, 40, was arrested at his flat in Santos on Thursday.

He was found guilty in Italy in 2017 for his part in the gang rape of an Albanian woman at a night club in Milan in January 2013.

The former Premier League player, whose real name is Robson De Souza, was one of six men found guilty of assaulting the Albanian woman.

In 2020 an appeals court confirmed the conviction and the Supreme Court in Rome dismissed his final appeal against the conviction in January 2022.

Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice (BSCJ), according to Globo, came to the landmark judgement to imprison him on Wednesday after Italian authorities had asked to extradite the 40-year-old in 2022.

Italy requested that he serve his sentence in his homeland after failing to get him extradited.

Nine of the court’s 15 ministers had voted in favour of the decision to incarcerate the footballer in Brazil.

On Thursday, his request to pause his detention was snubbed by a Supreme Court judge.

The Brazilian constitution does normally not normally permit the extraditions of native criminals. He could have faced arrest if he had travelled outside of Brazil.

Robinho claims he is innocent and has been living in Brazil for the past seven years.

Robinho, who was 28 and was playing for AC Milan at the time, admitted during his appeal to having ‘contact’ with the woman, but the Brazilian insisted it was consensual.

The Milan Court of Appeals found Robinho had ‘belittled’ and ‘brutally humiliated’ the victim as it upheld his original sentence in December 2020.

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