MADRID, 27 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The National Court has increased the sentence of Manuel Murillo by 15 months, the security guard who proposed to kill the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, through WhatsApp. Thus, it has set for him a sentence of eight years and nine months in prison for crimes of homicide in degree of proposal and deposit of weapons of war.
It was last April, when the Fourth Section of the Criminal Chamber sentenced Murillo to seven and a half years in prison. Now, the magistrates of the Appeals Chamber have estimated the appeal presented by the Prosecutor’s Office and have corrected the initial sentence.
Specifically, in the new sentence –signed this Tuesday– the penalty for the crime of homicide in proposition degree is increased to three years and nine months in prison (compared to the initial two years and six months). For its part, it has agreed to maintain the five years in prison for depositing weapons of war.
The Public Ministry appealed the original conviction because it believed that although Murillo’s plan to kill Sánchez was “incipient” it was not the first time he had proposed it, which “corroborated the existing danger” that there was, added to the fact that He had weapons in his possession. The Prosecutor’s Office had insisted that the plan “always dealt with the same objective” –Pedro Sánchez– and that Murillo “sought outside help” to carry out his strategy.
In this resolution, the Court of Appeals has approved the proven facts of the initial sentence that detailed that the accused was integrated into a WhatsApp group in which –as of June 2018– he published messages in which he showed his absolute disagreement with the exhumation of Franco’s remains. During those months and until his arrest –in September 2018– he privately expressed in different messages in that forum his intention to finish off the Prime Minister.
According to the sentence, the defendant “was internalizing that the solution to produce a change in the Spanish political situation was to cause the death of the President of the Government, for which he insisted on requesting help to carry it out.” It is also specified that he had numerous weapons and ammunition, some of them modified.
Thus, the magistrates have dismissed the appeal presented by Murillo in which he alleged that his right to the presumption of innocence had been violated and that there had been an error in the assessment of the evidence, as well as an improper application of the precepts of the homicide proposition of killing the President of the Government, deposit of weapons of war and possession of weapons of war. The man also insisted that the extenuating circumstances of alcohol intoxication and undue delay should have been applied.
The Appeals Chamber has defended that the initial ruling sets forth in a detailed and coherent manner the evidence of charges against Murillo and the material resolution “to end the life of the Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, whose agenda he received despite being finally erased by its sender and the contacts in which it was proposed, describing how to do it”.
The magistrates have underlined the homicidal attitude of the defendant with a growing sign over time to the point of alerting the person who reported him to the Police for his determination and discard his thesis that it was due to a vent or that it responded to “shared fantasies” as a result of loneliness coupled with the intake of alcohol or tranquilizers.
Likewise, he has assured that the arsenal of weapons that Murillo had together with the ideological radicalism of his writings -as well as the training in the shooting gallery that he carried out- reinforce the thesis of the doubled danger that the public accusation denounced.
