Global Courant 2023-05-04 03:40:24
An expert complicated the fourth Buenos Aires police officer who is being tried for the crime of Natalia Melmann, which occurred on February 4, 2001 in Miramar.
Gustavo Penacino assured that the DNA analysis of a pubic hair found on the victim’s body showed a 97 percent compatibility with the genetic profile of former sergeant Ricardo Panadero.
In his testimony before the Oral Criminal Court 4 of Mar del Plata, the biochemical expert representing the victim’s family said that there are “33 times more chances” that the sample analyzed belongs to the defendant than to another person.
In this sense, Penacino understood that the court in charge of the first trial of Panadero, in which he was unanimously acquitted, in July 2018, made an incorrect interpretation of this “incrimination index”, contemplating “33 as a percentage”.
Natalia Melmann was 15 years old.
As he specified, after reviewing the studies carried out in the case by the La Plata Expert Advisory, it was established that statistically “it is 33 times more likely” that the former sergeant accused “is the individual who provided the sample than the general population.” and that index translates into a “97.05 percent compatibility” with its genetic profile.
His testimony was the most relevant of the second day of the trial, since the weight of the analysis of that trace was one of the central points of the appeals presented after the ruling that acquitted Panadero in the first oral process, annulled in November 2019. by the Buenos Aires Court of Criminal Cassation, which ordered another trial to be held.
The defense, headed by the lawyer Lautaro Resúa, questioned this element when questioning the witness, and recalled that another official expert who intervened in the case had described the 3 percent margin of error as “very high”.
At the request of the defender, the testimony of the expert María Lojo, from the Expert Advisory, is scheduled tomorrow, who maintained in the first trial that this DNA study was inconclusive.
In this sense, the lawyers Yamil Castro Bianchi and Federico Paruolo, who represent Natalia’s parents -Gustavo Melmann and Laura Calampuca- as an individual victim, asked that Penacino be made available to the court to intervene again on the third day , in case it is necessary to complement the declaration of Lojo.
In the hearing this Wednesday, a neighbor from Mar del Sud, south of Miramar, also testified, who testified under a confidential identity in the case, and recalled that after the disappearance of Natalia, Panadero had made a comment about a jacket found, while a similar garment of the victim still did not appear.
The last testimony of the day was that of a taxi driver, who on the night of the crime claimed to have seen the minor with some friends, around 3:30 in the nightclub area, and that that morning he greeted him when Panadero passed by, but without remember exactly where.
The trial continues this Thursday with the testimonies of the witnesses proposed by the police’s defense, and on Friday the parties will present their arguments before judges Néstor Conti, Mariana Iriani and Juan Galarreta.
Resúa in turn announced that Panadero, accused of “illegitimate deprivation of liberty aggravated by the use of violence, sexual abuse aggravated by carnal access and by the participation of two or more people and aggravated homicide by the participation of two or more people and criminis causa”, will not provide a statement.
The former sergeant is the fourth police officer accused of the crime that shocked Miramar and the country in the summer of 2001, but his case was not part of the trial in which the other three -Oscar Echenique (63), Ricardo Anselmini (55) and Ricardo Suárez (60) – were sentenced to life imprisonment, in September 2002, because it was dismissed earlier.
The second trial for Natalia’s crime began on Tuesday, with the testimonies of the minor’s father and her mother, who claimed that “justice is taking 22 years.”
At the first hearing, a witness whose identity was reserved, who was 13 years old at the time of the crime, assured, meanwhile, that he had seen four policemen force the 15-year-old teenager into a police vehicle at the crossroads 6 and 35.
Melmann’s crime occurred on February 4, 2001 and provoked the reaction of the local community, which carried out multiple marches together with the family to ask for the clarification of the case.
As established in the trial in 2002, the victim was forced to get into a police van and taken to a house in the far south of Miramar, where “she was carnally accessed”, and then, “with the unequivocal purpose of seeking impunity of sexual assault,” was strangled to death with a shoelace.
The three police officers sentenced to life sentences later transferred the body to the Florentino Ameghino nursery, where it was found half buried four days later.
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