The Spaniard Daniel Sancho, the confessed butcher of the Colombian Edwin Arrieta, once again pleaded not guilty to the death of Arrieta at the beginning of his trial in Thailand.
“We have not seen any remorse”, summed up the representative of the victim’s family, Juan Gonzalo Ospina, on Tuesday at the end of a session of nearly ten hours, behind closed doors.
The father of the accused, the actor Rodolfo Sancho, entered and left like an arrow, without making statements. Nor did he have much leeway, given the threats uttered by the judge to persecute anyone who broke the confidentiality – imposed by himself – about what was substantiated in the courtroom.
On the other hand, Daniel’s mother, Silvia Bronchalo, also in Koh Samui, was unwell yesterday and did not attend.
After the reading of the charges, including premeditated murder, the defendant stuck to the version given during the hearing, in which he retracted his initial confession.
His lawyers have shown sympathy with the gag imposed by the judge, with total contempt for the Spanish journalists who arrived from China or Spain, in addition to Bangkok itself, whose entrance to the court has been banned, as the of any other informant. Mobile phones, cameras and recorders have also been banned.
Even the name of the judge has been declared confidential.
After Daniel Sancho rejected two of the three charges, the round of statements by four witnesses from the Prosecutor’s Office began, which Sancho would have interrupted and would have been interrogated several times. Among them, the Burmese woman who found the remains of the surgeon in a landfill and the Thai woman who rented him the motorcycle so he landed in Phangan.
Among the key witnesses of the next few days is the owner of the bungalows where the butchery was perpetrated or the woman who sold Sancho the kayak from which he threw several parts of the victim’s corpse into the sea.
None of the aforementioned restrictions help the transparency of the trial or the credibility of the sentence and instead feed the worst fears, in a country that every few years embarks on a crusade against corruption, without appreciable improvements.
However, Ospina believes that what the judge is looking for is “that there is no parallel trial”. The superior of the Jesuits in Thailand, Miguel Garaizábal, with decades of assistance to prisoners, says he does not remember anything like this, although he calls for trust in Thai justice.
Sancho’s defense claims that Arrieta died after receiving a blow during a fight with Sancho, who would have acted “in self-defense”. While the prosecutor aims to prove that it was a premeditated murder.
Edwin Arrieta was dismembered by his friend, lover or partner, Daniel Sancho – 15 years younger – on August 2 in one of the bungalows on the bucolic Salad beach, in Phangan.
The trial is also being watched with great anticipation in Lorica, Arrieta’s hometown and where his father, Leobaldo – who repaired transistors – and his mother, Marcela, who was a teacher, continue to live. Both say they hope “for justice to act according to law”, as a journalist friend of the family tells La Vanguardia.
Edwin Arrieta, of humble origins, had achieved a very comfortable social position as a plastic surgeon with consultations in wealthy neighborhoods of Santiago de Chile and Montería, epicenter of the Colombian cattle oligarchy. Thanks to his talent and work, he worked with senators and high society ladies, clients or not. Unmarried and without children, they clarify in his village that he did not have a double life, but that “he had a life in Colombia and another outside of Colombia”.
At 29, Daniel Sancho, with flirtations in the nets, tennis and the restaurant, was still searching for his place in the world, until the world found him – in his knives and in his garbage bags – on the paradise island of Phangan.
