Six months after the assassination attempt against Cristina Kirchner, the Federal Chamber today urged investigators to bring defendants Fernando Sabag Montiel and Brenda Uliarte to trial, identified as material co-authors of the attempted aggravated homicide of the vice president, and of Nicolás Carrizo, the boss of the drinks who was prosecuted as a secondary participant in the plan. This was resolved in a ruling signed this afternoon, where the house arrest that Carrizo had requested and to which the former president was opposed was again rejected.
“To urge the judge -taking into account what was rightly stated by the defense- that, given the situation of detention of the accused and the state of the investigation in their regard, proceed with the speed that the case requires in order to advance in the procedural stage”, wrote the judges Leopoldo Bruglia and Pablo Bertuzzi.
For his part, his colleague Mariano Llorens affirmed: “beyond the fact that the term of the process does not seem excessive for the different investigative hypotheses suggested by the Complaint -those that have not yet been proven even with the degree of certainty that this stage requires – The truth is that it seems inadmissible that the main fact has not been raised to trial when the investigation in its regard is exhausted and with its defendants in preventive detention, therefore, at least with respect to the procedural situation of Carrizo and his consorts , I understand that the actions are in the optimal time to proceed in accordance with the provisions of art. 346 of the CPPN in order to achieve a speedy completion of the trial”.
It all happened on the night of September 1. Cristina Kirchner arrived at her house, on the corner of Montevideo and Juncal in Recoleta. There they were waiting for her, as since the day the prosecutor Diego Luciani requested her sentence to 12 years in prison for illicit association and defrauding the State in her road case, a large group of her militants to greet her. Fernando Sabag Montiel was also there. He walked over and pointed a .32-caliber Bersa in his face, which he fired at least once. The bullet did not exit because it was not loaded in the chamber. He ended up trapped by militants, without the custody of Cristina Kirchner or herself realizing what had happened.
His girlfriend, Brenda Uliarte, disappeared from the place: she called several acquaintances, went to sleep at an ex-boyfriend’s house, then met the “drinks” and appeared on television with Carrizo to say that she had nothing to do see. On Sunday, September 4, four days after the attack, she was arrested at the Palermo railway station. A court clerk for Judge María Eugenia Capuchetti ordered the train to stop so they could arrest her when they were already on top of her and her wife wanted to escape from her.
Capuchetti, harshly questioned by Cristina Kirchner’s lawsuit, delegated the case to prosecutor Carlos Rívolo when the first challenges to the lawsuit against him began. At the request of the Federal Chamber, the prosecutor advanced on the so-called “Casablanca” track, which was opened when a legislative adviser named Jorge Abello arrived 23 days after the attack on the courts to say that he had heard PRO deputy Gerardo Millman say 48 hours before the assassination attempt, in a bar in front of Congress: “when they kill her, I’m on my way to the coast.”
The statement of the two women who were with Milman at the time and the claim of the lawsuit to kidnap the witnesses’ phones opened the conflict with the magistrate. Finally, Milman’s collaborators voluntarily handed over the phone to Rívolo when they were called again to testify. As indicated, they are now being analyzed. The lawsuit also recently claimed to investigate the role of the City Police in the days prior to the attack, focusing on the security minister on leave Marcelo D’Alessandro.
But in the meantime Sabag Montiel and Brenda Uliarte have been in prison with a firm prosecution since September 15, two weeks after the attack. It is that his defenses decided not to appeal. And Carrizo, detained in court after voluntarily handing over his phone as a witness and converted by his messages into a defendant, also has his prosecution confirmed since the end of October.
Now, Chamber I of the Federal Chamber reviewed the appeal of Carrizo’s defense, in charge of Gastón Marano, where he questioned that his client continued to be housed behind bars in the Marcos Paz prison. In his presentation, he insisted that his client had a good socio-environmental report drawn up by the Office of Judicial Delegates, he stressed that he would live with his current partner at home, that he had a “stable financial support” and that the boss of the drinks was already imprisoned for almost six months despite the fact that “there would be no evidence” in the investigation against him and he has not yet been sent to trial.
Cristina Kirchner, through her complaint, opposed house arrest. She insisted that if she was released from jail she could hinder the investigation and slipped that the couple she would live with would actually be a front for house arrest. The decision was left in the hands of judges Leopoldo Bruglia, Pablo Bertuzzi and Mariano Llorens.
In a joint vote, Bruglia and Bertuzzi reiterated the grounds for their first refusal: that Carrizo does not fit into the parameters of article 32 of Law 24660, which indicates that house arrest “may” proceed when the detainee is ill and cannot receive proper assistance in jail, have a terminal illness, are over 70 years of age or are pregnant or with children under 5 years of age.
And they pointed out that the new socio-environmental report is not enough to “depart from the criteria that we have been holding”. “The circumstances surrounding the appearance of the guarantor are not a minor issue, who, according to the defense, would have a long-standing affective bond with Carrizo, but for whom there are no records of telephone contacts, calls, or messages. This situation, until it can be clarified, dissuades us from making room for the requested restraint, especially in the face of the existence of a procedural risk such as the risk of flight, within the framework of a case of institutional gravity such as the one being investigated in the proceedings. ”, was added. The judges also did not rule out the risk of hindering the investigation.
In this context, the ruling underlined: “Carrizo is being prosecuted with preventive detention -under an order of merit confirmed by this Chamber- for the crime of attempted homicide aggravated by the premeditated concurrence of two or more people and for having been committed with a firearm, as a secondary participant; in real contest with falsification of public documents, as author”. And “the expectation of punishment for the crimes attributed and the seriousness of the facts investigated, are indicators of sufficient entity for the maintenance of the precautionary confinement, since – faced with the progress of the investigation – they increase the risk of flight.”
“In order to these premises, and in accordance with the position put forward by the accusations, the confirmation of the resolution put in crisis is imposed for the moment. This, not without first urging the a quo -taking into account what was rightly stated by the defense- that in view of the situation of detention of the accused and the state of the investigation in their regard, proceed with the speed that the case requires in order to advance in the procedural stage”, it was pointed out.
For his part, Judge Llorens also insisted on the assessment of Carrizo’s procedural risks to deny him the new request for residence. “Appellant also questioned the delay in bringing the case to trial. Let’s see. I have said on other occasions that justice that takes time is not justice; but neither is one that is pronounced mechanically, guided by the impulse to stick to a schedule. That is why the reasonable processing of the causes must be carried out in an optimal time ”, he affirmed.
After emphasizing that “the process will have a reasonable duration to the extent that its time is adjusted to the circumstances of the case”, Llorens stressed that “beyond the fact that the period of the process does not seem excessive for the different investigation hypotheses suggested by the Complaint – which have not yet been proven even with the degree of certainty that this stage requires – the truth is that it seems inadmissible that the main fact has not been raised to trial when the investigation in this regard is exhausted and with its defendants in court. pre-trial detention”.
