The trial against the Spanish cook Daniel Sancho, accused of the murder and dismemberment of the Colombian doctor Edwin Arrieta, began this Tuesday in the provincial court of the Thai island of Samui. His parents, Rodolfo Sancho and Silvia Bronchano, are in Thailand to support his son, who could face the death penalty. The actor is inside the court, where he arrived early in the morning. He is accompanied by a legal team that has been working for months to prove that it was a reckless homicide and not a premeditated murder, a thesis that the prosecution will defend to avoid the death penalty at all costs.
This same Tuesday, HBO Max released episode zero of 'The Sancho Case', a four-part documentary series that investigates in real time the event that this summer shocked public opinion and gave rise to hundreds of pages and hours of coverage. in all media. The entire series will arrive on the platform after the judicial resolution of the case.
The process, which will have a temporary hiatus due to the celebration of Songkran, the Thai new year, will last until May 3. Fourteen sessions are planned and the intervention of more than fifty witnesses, among whom will be the father of the accused, who will testify at the request of the defense. Once the testimonies are over, the court will have between four and eight weeks to issue the sentence.
Both Daniel Sancho and his father will testify on April 25, the first day of the defense shift, which is led by local lawyer Aprichat Srinuel. Among the defense witnesses will be several police officers, a criminologist, Spanish forensic experts, a psychologist, an expert in saws and a linguist specialized in Spanish translations.
Before, the 28 people proposed by the prosecutor will have testified. For their part, the Arrieta family's lawyers, who will adhere to the sentence requested by the Prosecutor's Office, will only call the victim's parents, Ana Marcela Arteaga and Leovaldo José Arrieta, to the stand. However, the court rejected the request to declare the marriage by videoconference due to the difficulty in traveling from Colombia due to his age.
Cheated
Initially, Sancho confessed to the murder before the Phangan Police, the island where the events took place on August 2 of the year. A confession that was made without a translator and about which the criminologist Carmen Balfagón has denounced on more than one occasion that the authorities “tricked” the Spaniard into confessing the authorship of the crime, making him believe that in this way he would return to Spain in just two days. . Ella Balfagón has assured that she was even given “false documents” to sign.
The main controversy is over the cause of death. In this sense, lawyer Marcos García Montes, who heads the defense team, has stressed that the mechanism of death must be determined: “if it is a homicide, a murder, a reckless homicide, or it is nothing, because there is a full defense.
The circumstances
Thai authorities maintain that Arrieta died from a stab wound with a murder weapon that “no one knows where it is,” García Montes has argued. For its part, the defense maintains that “he hit Arrieta in a fight to defend himself from a sexual assault and never confessed to the intentional crime, although he did dispose of the body.” Precisely the psychologist called by the defense lawyers will be in charge of explaining the scientific reasons that could have led Sancho to hide the body, as Balfagón has specified in recent days.
In summary, as García Montes stressed in the press conference in which he presented the work carried out by the legal team, “we are on the line that we have set from day one, because all this changes on August 21 when the Police say there has been a fight; The fight excludes premeditation and we would already be involved in homicide; a homicide that the Police themselves leaked different videos saying that there was a fight, there are images that we will provide, and that this man in a struggle falls into a bathtub and almost fractures his occipital bone, which is the cause of death, with which we are “in reckless homicide at most.” To which it should be added that “there may also be mitigating circumstances, of which there are many, such as threats, blackmail, coercion, etc.; and a mental state of a transient disorder.
In this sense, García Montes has expressed that the legal team has “testimonials, documentaries and experts that prove that the line of defense that we have proposed is not utopia but facts.”
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