Mother and daughter on trial in Spain for shooting of politician
A 60-year-old woman and her daughter face trial proceedings in León after killing the provincial president of the PP in 2014, in a crime that shocked Spain.
Mother and daughter on trial in Spain for shooting of politician
Montserrat González, 60, and her daughter Triana Martínez took the stand as defendants on Tuesday in a court in León for the murder of Isabel Carrasco, a Popular Party leader who headed the provincial administration since 2007. The crime, carried out in broad daylight on 12 May 2014, sparked considerable shock in a country that had not witnessed an attack of this nature since the end of ETA violence.
According to the prosecution and testimony collected by i24NEWS, González ambushed Carrasco in the afternoon on a pedestrian footbridge in the capital of León. With her face concealed by a scarf and dark glasses, she shot her in the back and then fired two more shots to the head. Her daughter waited nearby and both fled the scene.
A retired national police officer who witnessed the events followed the two women and alerted the authorities, which enabled their arrest. The same witness observed them leaving the weapon inside a vehicle belonging to Raquel Gago, a Local Police officer in León, who was also arrested and is sitting in the dock alongside the mother and daughter.
During the first day of the trial, González told the court that she killed Carrasco as revenge for the treatment the politician had given her daughter. Martínez had worked on a temporary contract at the provincial administration until 2011, when another candidate was chosen to replace her. The accused stated that her daughter lost her job for refusing to have sexual relations with Carrasco.
When asked whether she regretted the homicide, González answered plainly: "No. I would be lying if I said otherwise." She added that, had she not acted, the victim "would have continued making life impossible" for her daughter.
The State Prosecutor is seeking a sentence of 23 years in prison for each of the three defendants: the person who carried out the murder, her daughter and the local police officer who provided the car to conceal the pistol.
Carrasco's murder shook Spanish public opinion, which had left behind the attacks against PP officials in the nineteen-nineties and early twenty-first century, then attributed to the terrorist group ETA, which announced its definitive ceasefire in October 2011.
Source: Google News MS — Crime