A German was sentenced to life on Thursday (February 17) for the stoning of his wife and sons in a cave on the Spanish island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands in 2019, a court in the archipelago has announced.
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Thomas Handrick was "
sentenced to permanent, revisable prison
", equivalent in Spain to life, for "
the murder in (April) 2019 of his wife and one of his sons with a stone
", indicated a court in Spain.
Spanish archipelago in a press release.
This father was also sentenced for having tried to kill his other son, then aged seven, "
without succeeding because the latter managed to flee and survive after walking for a long time in a remote and uninhabited area
" of the island, located off Western Sahara.
On April 23, 2019, Thomas Handrick, then 43 years old, "
intentionally led his wife and two children aged 10 and 7 to a cave, between two ravines in a mountainous area, where they could not receive aid
" in the town of Adeje, in the south of the island.
It was there that he "
hit (his wife) several times (...) with his hands and using a stone
" until he killed her, the court said in its verdict.
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When the eldest son had intervened to protect his mother, the latter had suffered the same fate, while his seven-year-old brother had managed to flee and sound the alarm, which had made it possible to arrest the father of family.
A vast research system then made it possible to find the corpses of the mother and the son in this cave, a tragedy which had aroused a wave of indignation in Spain.
