Global Courant
Darío Holzweissig, arrested for the crime of Griselda Blanco, asked that he be sentenced in an abbreviated trial.
A week after the arrest of the night businessman from Curuzú Cuatiá, Darío Alfredo Ricardo Holzweissig, the defense requested that he be sentenced in an abbreviated trial to eight years in prison for the murder of journalist Griselda Blanco. The request is now being analyzed by the chief prosecutor of Corrientes, who usually takes into account the position of the complainant to resolve these issues.
If this criterion is maintained, the request would be rejected next week and the investigation will continue until it leads to an oral and public trial. Judicial sources said that the parties could also raise a partial abbreviated trial in which the defendant acknowledges the facts and evidence but the discussion of the qualification and the sentence is deferred for when the case is raised to the Trial Court.
The lawyer representing the journalist’s children rejected the request and this Friday presented a request to the prosecutor María Barrero Sahagún to advance an indictment of Holzweissig for the crime of femicide, or for homicide qualified by the couple relationship .
The lawyer Alejandro Gómez was the one who raised this Thursday the request for an abbreviated trial to the prosecutor Barrero Sahagún. The statement surprised everyone because the result of the DNA studies on the rope that the victim had tied around her neck and the hair that appeared in one of her hands still remains to be known. For her part, the prosecutor considered that she could carry out the abbreviated trial but with a penalty of not less than ten years in prison.
Gómez maintained that the Procedural Code establishes that from the imputation hearing an abbreviated trial can be requested. “Here is a request from my client, who wants to avoid stigmatizing his family, unnecessary suffering for his children,” said the defender.
The businessman of the night Darío Alfredo Ricardo Holzweissig (46), arrested for the crime of the journalist from Corrientes Griselda Blanco (44).
As Gómez requested the minimum sentence established for the crime of simple homicide, the case must be turned over to the head of the Corrientes prosecutors to have his endorsement. In Corrientes a trial can only be shortened when the defendant admits his guilt and accepts a sentence of not less than half the maximum established for the crime of which he is accused.
The Federal Police Homicide investigators together with the prosecutor have so far gathered a series of strong indications that prove a link between the victim and the businessman. First it was confirmed that there was a commercial relationship between the journalist and the businessman, but then it turned towards a more personal one. After a while, Blanco would have started to demand that Holzweissig pay certain sums of money to keep quiet about the relationship, since the businessman was married.
They came to this conclusion after analyzing hundreds of WhatsApp messages and audios that were rescued from the victim’s cell phone after cloning the SIM card from Blanco’s phone that the murderer made disappear.
After the temporary arrest of Blanco’s ex-partner, the communicator Armando Jara, the prosecutor and the Federal Police Homicide agents worked on other indications and it was the woman’s children who placed Holzweissig as a suspect.
The security cameras were key to locating the businessman of the night in the vicinity of the victim’s home. The images allowed us to establish that he left his house at 2:11 in the morning on Saturday, May 20, aboard his wife’s Suzuki Swift. He used an unreasonable path to get to the vicinity of the journalist’s house. At 2:37 he was seen walking very close to Griselda’s house. And that he left at 3:12 with a phone in his hand and the same bag he had arrived with.
The man arrived at his house again -on Route 126- at 3:35 a.m. and ten minutes later he is seen walking towards the open field where a knife and a broken cell phone were found on Friday morning, identical to the one that disappeared from the house of the journalist. At 4:02 a.m., he went back to the vacant lot next to Route 126. “The camera only shows him walking towards that place but doesn’t capture what he’s doing,” a source said.
Blanco with Armando Jara, his ex-partner, who was arrested for the crime and later released. Facebook photo
Holzweissig’s cell phone was seized and it was found that he had deleted the history of conversations with the victim. The feds were able to salvage much of the messages. The rest came from the SIM Swapping of the journalist’s phone. It is a simple procedure that only requires a series of personal data from the victim to take possession of the SIM card and thus be able to access all the contents of the phone.
Blanco’s children recognized that the destroyed device that appeared in the vacant lot is the same model and the same color as the one used by their mother, but there is still a lack of expertise to corroborate it.
The autopsy revealed that Griselda Blanco suffered a severe blow to the head and two stab wounds to the neck that did not injure important arteries. The cause of her death was strangulation with a rope in which male genetic material remained, which is already being analyzed by experts from Corrientes Capital.
Several hairs were found in one of the woman’s hands that she pulled out from the murderer when he was fighting for his life. From the morphological analysis it emerged that they are identical to those of Holzweissig, but one of them had the bulb and the Barrero Sahagún prosecutor’s office and the Federal Police are convinced that it will coincide with the genetic profile of the imprisoned businessman.
AS
