The Spanish Daniel Sancho has once again pleaded not guilty at the beginning of the trial for the death of the Colombian Edwin Arrieta, this Tuesday in Thailand. After the reading of the charges in the Samui Provincial Court, including premeditated murder, the alleged chef has stuck to the version given during the hearing of the case, following the recommendation of his Madrid law firm. In this way, he renounces his initial self-incrimination, which was the surest way to avoid capital punishment.
“We have not seen any regret in him,” said the representative of the victim’s family, Juan Gonzalo Ospina, at the end of a marathon day, which lasted two and a half hours longer than expected.
The trial is taking place behind closed doors on this holiday island, half an hour by ferry from the island of Phangan, where the crime was committed. The father of the accused, the actor Rodolfo Sancho, has also not made any statements upon leaving the court, more than ten hours after his entry.
Not so the Spanish lawyer for the Arrieta family, Juan Gonzalo Ospina, who has acknowledged “cordial” and “humane” contacts with the Sancho family. He has also recognized what the cloud of Spanish journalists had just discovered. Namely, that “it has been agreed that the trial will be held behind closed doors.”
After Daniel Sancho rejected the possibility of accepting the charges, the round of statements from witnesses from the prosecution has begun. Two have been able to do it before the lunch break, the Burmese woman who found the surgeon’s remains rummaging through a landfill and the person who rented her the motorcycle as soon as she disembarked in Phangan.
Among the key witnesses in the coming days is the owner of the bungalows where the carnage took place or the woman who sold Sancho the kayak with which he disposed of various parts of the body in the sea.
The judge in charge of the case, whose name is confidential, this Tuesday prohibited all attendees from reporting what is happening inside the courtroom. Likewise, he has even warned the lawyers and the prosecutor not to offer details of the process, and has warned that if it is proven that information has been disseminated, those responsible will be prosecuted, who could face prison sentences.
None of the above helps the transparency of the trial or the credibility of the sentence and instead feeds the worst fears, in a country that every few years has embarked on a new crusade against corruption, without appreciable improvements.
The verdict in any case will not arrive until late May. At the beginning of next week there will be no session due to the celebration of Songkran, one of the two most important holidays in Thailand, when people splash each other with water.
According to Ospina, the judge was very “rigorous”, and, given the seriousness of the events, “he does not want there to be any type of parallel trial or to be informed of what the witnesses are referring to”, the only thing allowed, he added. , are “general assessments of how the process is developing.”
At one point during the session, Thai police entered the room to make sure that “no one had any devices to take images” or record sound, he added.
The accused, 29, is represented by Thai court-appointed lawyer Aprichat Srinuel. Sancho has been charged with premeditated murder, concealment of the body and destruction of another’s passport, but he only accepts the second of these charges.
The defense will try to demonstrate at trial that Arrieta’s death was due to an accident during a fight in which Sancho would have acted “in self-defense.” While the prosecutor, Jeerawat Sawatdichai, will defend that it was a premeditated murder, aggravated by the confessed dismemberment of the corpse and the confessed concealment of its parts, as well as the falsehood in reporting the “disappearance” of the surgeon to the police station, when a sister or his friend contacted him with alarm from Colombia through social networks.
Edwin Arrieta was dismembered by his young friend Daniel Sancho – fifteen years his junior – on August 2 in a bungalow on the bucolic beach of Salad, in Phangan. The trial is also being followed with great attention in Lorica, Arrieta’s hometown and where his father – who fixed transistors – and his mother, who was a teacher, continue to live.
Edwin Arrieta studied Medicine in his country, at the great sacrifice of his parents, and specialized in cosmetic surgery in Argentina. He started working there and in Brazil. For a few years, it had its own clinic in Santiago de Chile, in the elitist neighborhood of Las Condes, and in El Recreo, another exclusive neighborhood in Montería, the Colombian city that was known as a fiefdom of landowners and paramilitaries, a few kilometers from the latifundia of former president Álvaro Uribe.
Edwin Arrieta, a man of the utmost modesty, single and without children, had achieved a very comfortable social position, thanks to his talent and work, and rubbed shoulders in his country with senators and ladies of high society. At 29 years old, Daniel Sancho, with dabbles in social networks, tennis and restaurants, was still looking for his place in the world, until the world found him – him, his knives and his garbage bags – in the paradise island of Phangan.