Two suspects in Pechina farmhouse murder released on bail of €20,000
An Almería judge has freed the two suspects in the January shooting death after it emerges that the fatal bullet does not match their weapons. The defence requests 3D ballistic reconstruction and further evidence.
Bail granted to suspects in Almería farmhouse murder
The investigating court in Almería has released on bail of €20,000 the two main suspects in the fatal shooting of the owner of a farmhouse in Pechina, which occurred on 18 January during what was believed to be an attempted cannabis robbery. According to ABC, the order was issued on 19 August by the judge of Plaza 6 of the Instruction Section of the Court of First Instance, who also imposed tracking measures on both suspects.
The ruling comes after defence lawyer Adrián Marinel Ghita, of the AMG Lawyers law firm, requested new expert evidence by presenting a key finding from the ballistics report compiled by the Guardia Civil: the bullet extracted from the victim's body was not fired by either of the two weapons attributed to the suspects.
A third gun unlocated
Investigators recovered four nine-millimetre Parabellum bullet casings at the scene, fired from outside the property with two different pistols. However, neither of those two weapons matches the fatal bullet. "In the current state of proceedings, the weapon that produced the fatal shot has not been identified, nor is there scientific correspondence between the bullet and the casings recovered at the scene," the lawyer stated.
The existence of a third unlocated weapon opens several hypotheses. The defence does not rule out that the crime scene was tampered with before officers arrived. It also suggests that the victim may have fired shots from inside towards outside, and that a bullet may have ricocheted off the window frame, striking his abdomen.
Reconstruction of events
Security cameras at the farmhouse captured how three people entered the property heading towards the window of the room where the victim was located. The footage also showed a cloud of dust or smoke emanating outwards from the upper part of that window, before shots were fired from outside. The victim's partner stated that the intruders burst in around 4:20 a.m. and that the cannabis they were believed to have tried to steal had been removed from the property several days earlier.
On the night of 18 January, the three suspects travelled to Camino Carretero, where the farmhouse is located, in a car purchased just nine days earlier from a dealer in Murcia. They got out hooded and armed; one of them was wearing a police uniform and carrying a cap that was later found at his home. Following the attack, they left the property while several security cameras tracked them. That same day, around 2 p.m., a vehicle was found on fire in the Almería neighbourhood of Los Almendros whose registration number and characteristics matched the car captured in the footage.
Cover-up and arrests
Based on these leads, investigators identified the suspects and intercepted their communications, placing them near the scene at the time of the events and close to where the vehicle was set on fire. The investigation also established that the alleged perpetrators enlisted a couple they knew to try to conceal the purchase of the car in Murcia, threatening the dealer owner so he would not reveal the transaction.
The arrests took place on 13 June through home searches in which mobile phones, clothing, quantities of cannabis and equipment related to its handling were recovered. A total of five people were arrested: three as suspected perpetrators of murder and illegal weapons possession, and two others investigated for covering up the crime. One of the detainees confessed to part of the facts to the Guardia Civil. Another of the suspects, who had spent time in Palma de Mallorca, was located in a district of Cuevas del Almanzora.
New proceedings requested
The judge has ordered a new forensic medical report to confirm, modify or expand the analysis of the circumstances of death, given that the bullet does not appear to have come from outside. Likewise, he has consulted with investigators the feasibility of carrying out the remaining proceedings requested by the defence: a search for new weapons and bullets at the scene, a three-dimensional ballistic reconstruction and a new statement from the eyewitness witness in view of possible contradictions with her initial testimony.
The case, which began with the hypothesis of an assault to carry out a drug robbery—theft from traffickers—now acquires a ballistic complexity that the investigating judge must resolve before the proceedings advance to the oral phase.
Source: ABC