Recent sentences dictate prison sentences for relatives or friends who help those who kill their partners or ex-partners to flee or hide, as in the case that occurred in Elche at the end of the year
On Christmas day, Francisco N. shot Yolanda M. in the head. The 22-year-old murderer then fled through the streets of Elche. On the run for almost a week, during which time the National Police tried to follow in his footsteps, on the penultimate day of the year he went to the house of his ex-partner and his daughter, armed with an AK-47 machine gun and a nine-millimeter revolver. He didn’t find them. Upon being discovered, the executioner of this 25-year-old mother and two children aged nine and three, barricaded himself with four hostages and, when the police arrived, a shootout began. Twenty minutes later, the suspect in the last gender murder of the year in Spain turned himself in.
Twelve days later, the investigations led to the arrest of Francisco N.’s accomplices. Eleven people, between men and women. On Monday of this week, the head of the Alicante investigating court ordered that two of the women be placed in provisional prison, communicated and without bail, for the crime of covering up the crime of Yolanda M. One of them is also accused of illegal possession of weapons. The two detainees remain in prison, according to sources related to the court, and two others were released on bail.
To be an accessory in a homicide case, one must have knowledge of the “commission of the crime” and help the person responsible to evade the investigation or escape from search and capture.
«For practical purposes, it is not enough to know the commission of a crime so that the concurrence of the crime of concealment can be confirmed. More is needed », indicates Jaime Campaner, lawyer and professor of Criminal Procedure Law at the University of the Balearic Islands and ISDE, who points out three types of cover-up in the Penal Code: non-profit participants in the crime, concealment of evidence and help to evade investigation. The spouse is also exempt, although “the Spanish legislator has chosen not to require a different conduct from the family nucleus of the person who has committed a crime.”
The cover-up is perpetrated in “various kinds of assistance to those who have committed a crime. Therefore, the mere knowledge that a crime has been committed is not enough: there is no general duty to report in Spain,” says Manuel Cancio, professor Criminal Law of the Autonomous University of Madrid. “In the cover-up, the law takes into account (art. 454 CP) that it is not required that a person closely linked to the perpetrator of the crime does not help him. Thus, they are exempt from the penalty that would correspond to the cover-up – thus establishing a personal exemption of the penalty for unenforceability of other conduct- those who carry out the conduct with respect to their spouses or persons to whom they are linked by a similar emotional relationship, as well as with respect to their ascendants, descendants, siblings or related in the same degrees “. In this case, he points out, the arrest must affect “more distant relatives of the author, that is, beyond the inner circle”
elongated leak
In a society where silence in the face of gender-based violence is usually the rule, with less than 2% of complaints by family members or the victim’s environment according to data from the CGPJ, the fence is beginning to tighten around the accessories of the gender-based fatal crimes. This crime used to be reserved to aggravate the sentences of the convicted sexist murderer himself. However, recent judicial decisions reveal that the ability to maneuver to help a criminal of gender violence escape or go unpunished is reduced, when only 24% of the murderers surrender and another quarter commit suicide, according to the Observatory Against Gender Violence. The rest are arrested after committing their crime. Some lengthen their flight.
When analyzing the jurisprudence, is there a tendency to surround the accessories of this type of crime? The trend extends “to everything that surrounds gender violence, whose repression is clearly expanding,” Campaner maintains. “The close circle of the alleged perpetrator of a blood crime who has not been arrested red-handed or shortly after the events is usually investigated in criminal proceedings, although on many occasions these people do not end up being prosecuted because they are considered to be in the investigation phase. that the elements necessary to complete the type of cover-up do not concur.
for 300 euros
In the most recent prison sentence for a person who helped a macho murderer escape, the niece of the aggressor was sentenced to three months in prison, when the prosecution requested up to 21 months, due to his subsequent cooperation in convince his uncle to turn himself in. The man was hiding in Morocco. The victim was Juana U., 47 years old, and lived in Parla (Madrid). Her executioner, Abdelfettah K., 38, hit her on the head and then stabbed her ten times.
The following afternoon he contacted his niece by phone. They met in Madrid, he told her about the murder and asked for her help to flee to Tangier. She handed him 200 euros for the trip, and then sent him another 100. She claimed that she did not believe her uncle when he confessed to her and tried to convince him to turn himself in. The court did not believe him. They found Juana three days later, due to the complaint made by her boss, when she did not show up for work. The niece never notified the authorities.
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