06/02/2020 - 13:53
- Clarín.com
- Police
The Oral Criminal Court (TOC) 7 of Lomas de Zamora sentenced Marcos Esteban Bazán (34) to life in prison for the femicide of Anahí Benítez (16), which occurred in 2017 in the Santa Catalina de Lomas de Zamora reserve. The condemned person did not want to be present via videoconference.
The conviction was for considering him co-author of the crime of "illegal deprivation of liberty aggravated, homicide aggravated by treachery, criminis causa and for mediating gender violence (femicide)".
The reading of the sentence began at 1:50 p.m. (lasted 8 minutes) in the courts of Lomas de Zamora and was transmitted on the "Teams" platform, as happened in the last hearings that resumed after a 57-day stoppage by the quarantine of the coronavirus, with the accused following the trial by videoconference from Unit 9 of La Plata, although in the latter he preferred not to be.
Last Wednesday, judges Elisa López Moyano, Roberto Conti and Roberto Lugones only released their condemnatory verdict for the owner of the house where Anahí is believed to have been detained, drugged, raped and murdered.
The debate began in February with another defendant on the bench of the accused, Marcelo Sergio Villalba (42) , whose DNA was found in the victim's body, but this man stopped being tried at the second hearing because it was concluded that he was a "psychotic" who was in no condition to stand trial.
In his plea, the prosecutor Hugo Carrión affirmed that Anahí was "tortured and reified" and asked Bazán for life in prison as a co-author, or failing that necessary participant, of the crimes of "illegal deprivation of aggravated liberty, aggravated homicide for treachery, criminis causes and for mediating domestic violence "(femicide) and as a necessary participant in" sexual abuse aggravated by carnal access ".
Beyond the fact that he was no longer being tried, the prosecutor also referred to Villalba - who has a conviction for abuse in the Federal Capital - as the author of the rape of Anahí and co-author of the crime, and recalled that the victim's cell phone had been found in the possession of one of his sons.
Marcos Bazán, detained in Unit 9 of La Plata, followed the hearings by video call.
As key evidence against the condemned, Carrión mentioned the smell of the well-known sniffer dog Bruno, from Escobar's canine brigade, whom he defined as "the femicide detector".
According to the prosecutor, the dog detected the odoriferous trace of Anahí inside his house and the presence of the accused himself in the grave where the body of the victim was found, 235 meters from his home.
Other indications were a scissor kidnapped in the Bazán house that the girl used to have in a backpack, a key that Anahí used to hang around her neck and that was found to open the door of the defendant's home and a shovel of the accused with earth similar to that of the site where the body was buried.
The prosecution's hypothesis was that Anahí knew Bazán because of their interest in nature and their artistic inclinations, and that, in this context, the accused kidnapped her, kept her at home, drugged her with "burundanga" and there she was raped by Villalba.
For the investigators, after that and when they saw the police search being carried out by the young woman, the accused decided to murder her to hide the crimes they had committed.
Anahí's mother denounces that there may be more involved in the murder of her daughter.
The complaint had also requested life imprisonment for Bazán, while the defense had asked for acquittal for lack of evidence and by suggesting that it was an "armed cause".
Anahí was last seen on July 29, 2017 when he left his house in Parque Barón, in Lomas de Zamora, to take a walk and on August 4 his body was found naked, with cutting injuries and blows to the head, buried in the Santa Catalina Nature Reserve.
The autopsy determined that she was strangled, that she had been given drugs and that in these conditions she had been abused.
In the last ten years in Argentina there is an average of one femicide every 30 hours. According to statistics from the Supreme Court's Office of Domestic Violence, in 2018 alone there were 278. The majority of murders occur in the houses of the victims and are committed by couples or ex.
Where to callLine 144
Care for women in situations of violence.
Line 137Attention to Victims of Family Violence.
911 Emergencies
