Global Courant 2023-05-02 18:38:38
Natalia Melmann was 15 years old when she was raped and murdered by members of the Buenos Aires Police. She was in Miramar, in February 2001. For her femicide, three members of the force were sentenced to life.
Now, former sergeant Ricardo Panadero, the fourth defendant and who was acquitted twice, is being tried again starting this Tuesday in Mar del Plata.
The accusation that Panadero faces is very serious. He is charged with the crime 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”.
Natalia Melmann was 15 years old when she was raped and murdered in 2001.
The accusation against the fourth officer implicated was not part of the trial in which the other three officers, Oscar Echenique (63), Ricardo Anselmi (55) and Ricardo Suárez (60), were sentenced to life imprisonment in September 2002. Panadero he had been dismissed prior to that conviction.
At that time, the Justice determined that the three members of the Buenos Aires were responsible for the femicide of Melmann.
A resolution of the provincial Supreme Court, however, revoked that dismissal and in July 2018, Panadero was tried again by the Oral Criminal Court 4 of Mar del Plata. There, he was also unanimously acquitted by judges Juan Manuel Sueyro, Fabián Riquet and Jorge Peralta.
However, said ruling was appealed by the Mar del Plata Attorney General’s Office and by the trial prosecutor, Ana María Caro, on the grounds that “there was an incorrect assessment of the probative material” and that “relevant elements were disregarded.”
The parents of the victim and his lawyer, Federico Paruolo, also appealed for acquittal, considering that “a biased and arbitrary analysis of the evidence was carried out.”
To court for the third time
On November 13, 2019, and based on the appeals filed, Chamber III of the Buenos Aires Criminal Cassation Court annulled the second acquittal and ordered a new trial to be held. This third instance is the one that started this Tuesday.
In this new process, TOC 4 is made up of judges Néstor Conti, Mariana Iriani and Juan Galarreta.
Ricardo Panadero is the fourth officer from Buenos Aires implicated in the femicide. Photo: The Capital
In this new instance, the prosecutor will once again be Caro and the lawyers Paruolo and Yamil Castro Bianchi will intervene as a private individual, representing Gustavo Melmann and Laura Calampuca, parents of the murdered young woman.
The hearings take place on the sixth floor of the Mar del Plata courts and are expected to last for at least four consecutive days, until Friday or next Monday.
Judicial sources indicated that they will testify between two and five witnesses every day. Among them the parents of the minor, and that the closing arguments of the parties could be made on Friday or the following Monday.
rape, femicide
On February 4, 2001, after going out with her friends, Natalia Melmann disappeared. Before the complaint and in the middle of the summer season, hundreds of people mobilized looking for clues about her whereabouts. She was looking for her alive.
But, four days after her disappearance, the teenager’s body was found hidden under leaves and branches in the municipal nursery. Melmann had been murdered.
The femicide provoked a reaction from the local community, which held multiple marches to ask for the clarification of the case and even produced a political impact: the then president, Fernando De la Rúa, met a few days later with the parents of the young woman in Miramar .
More than 20 years after the crime of Natalia Melmann, her family is still waiting for justice.
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, in the Copacabana neighborhood, where “she was carnally accessed” and then “with the unequivocal purpose of procuring impunity for sexual assault”, was strangled with a shoelace. The young woman was raped and murdered.
The three police officers sentenced to life sentences later transferred the body to the Florentino Ameghino nursery, where it was found days later.
