The trial against Daniel Sancho for the murder of Colombian surgeon Edwin Arrieta last August on an island in Thailand has been heard for sentencing. After four intense weeks, with numerous witnesses, inconveniences, delays and statements, the judicial procedure came to an end ahead of schedule, this past Thursday, May 2, and with the plea of ??the accused.
Rodolfo Sancho’s son defended his innocence for 45 minutes, during which time he again accused the police of having set a trap for him and insisted that there was neither premeditation nor murder since, according to him, he hit Edwin Arrieta in self-defense. . Now, all that remains is to wait for the sentence, which will be announced on August 29 at 10:00 a.m.
This Friday, Marcos García Montes, Daniel Sancho’s Spanish lawyer, responded live on Ana Rosa Quintana’s program to many of the questions that had been left in the air regarding Daniel Sancho’s defense. Manu Marlaska revealed that one of the big gaps in the case was why Daniel Sancho had rented a bungalow if Edwin Arrieta had rented a room in a luxury resort.
”The president made it very clear at the beginning of the trial, only the evidence presented at the trial is valid (…) We have focused on the trial and it matters very little to me from the sentencing point of view if was or was not before, whether he paid or did not pay or whether he received money. I’m interested in what the core of a homicide said. The forensic doctors said that the date of death could not be known and the manner or mechanism of death could not be known either,” said the lawyer, who in turn insisted that they had tried to prove that it had been an accidental death.
After the case came to light at the end of August, one of the main hypotheses that was being considered at the time was the alleged sexual blackmail that Edwin Arrieta carried out on Sancho. A matter that had not come to trial. ”Neither we nor the prosecutor, who is the accuser, have used it. He has not been touched, so we must forget it, like the reconstruction of the events, nor the appearance of a knife twelve days later, we must be serious,’ he replied.
Moments later, Manu Marlaska insisted and asked the lawyer why they had not used that route in the defense to show that Sancho was terrified of Edwin Arrieta in the face of a possible sexual assault. ”That would imply premeditation and there was none, because if Daniel Sancho buys the knives, which the prosecutor and the police have already said has nothing to do with this alleged homicide procedure, then we have not used it because it did not make sense,” explained.
”Yes, we have used that the injuries he had and against which he did not defend himself were caused by someone behind the first of them, and as a consequence of an attempted rape, that has been said and is proven,” he asserted.
