A 27-year-old man was sentenced this Monday to life in prison for the double femicide of his ex-partner and her 7-year-old daughter, whom he cut their throats and buried in the funds of a house in the Buenos Aires town of Monte Chingolo, party of Lanús, in April 2020, in full isolation due to the coronavirus pandemic, judicial sources reported.
The verdict was issued by the Oral Criminal Court (TOC) 2 of Lomas de Zamora and reached Abel Alejandro Romero Lugo (27), who was found guilty of “qualified homicide by the link and for having been perpetrated by a man against a woman mediating gender violence in real competition with homicide qualified by his commission for treachery” against Cristina Beatriz Iglesias (40) and her daughter, Ada Antonia Iglesias (7).
The court headed by Judge Mariela Gianina Aprile endorsed with this ruling the request made by the lawsuit, made up of lawyers Mariano Lizardo and Paula Ojeda.
“We are very satisfied with the objective result and the qualification. Life imprisonment is what this person deserves that he committed an aberrant crime, although no type of conviction will return happiness to Cristina and Ada’s family,” Lizardo assured Télam.
Meanwhile, the lawyer Ojeda -specialist in gender-, said that “The qualification of the aggravating circumstance for gender violence was fought until the last moment despite the fact that the trial prosecutor, who is a woman, requested that it not be judged as a femicide.”
It is that the representative of the Public Ministry Leila Selem, in charge of the accusation in the debate, requested, by alleging that Romero Lugo be sentenced for the crime of double homicide doubly aggravated by treachery and by the link”, without the aggravating circumstance of paragraph 11 of the article 80 of the Penal Code.
For its part, the defendant’s defense “did not object to the facts” and “consented to the authorship and responsibility” of Romero Lugo, although it did discuss the aggravating circumstances and requested that the defendant be convicted only of the crime of “double simple homicide.”
After the arguments were over, the accused had a chance to pronounce his “last words” before the court, on which occasion he asked “forgiveness” and said he was “repentant”.
“It was the first act of repentance that he showed since the beginning of the debate,” Lizardo said.
Line 144: care, support and advice in situations of gender violence. By WhatsApp: +5491127716463.
The double femicide
the event occurred on March 25, 2020 – five days after the start of social, preventive and mandatory isolation (Aspo) due to the coronavirus pandemic-, and was discovered two days later in a house on Calle Domingo Punta 4064, in Monte Chingolo, in the south of the suburbs.
According to coroners who worked at the scene, Cristina Iglesias was hit in the head and her throat was slashed in the context of a fight, while her daughter received cuts on her neckfor which the aggressor took advantage of the “condition of vulnerability and defenselessness of the victim, derived from their physical difference and strength,” according to the prosecutor’s request.
Romero Lugo, who was Cristina’s partner at the time of the incident, was arrested two days later and, after inventing an alibi, ended up confessing to the double femicide.
In the trial – to which Télam had access -, the prosecutor of first instance, Jorge Grieco, reported that in an informal statement to the police the accused accused an acquaintance of his who sold him marijuana to consume and made stories “soap operas and implausible in which, incredibly, he was a victim who acted under duress in order to stay alive”.
Finally, in his court statement he confessed to the crime and He said he killed his girlfriend while they were using pills and alcohol and then killed the girl, after which he dug the well at the back of the house and buried the bodies.
The researchers determined that the defendant “cleaned the main scene with great dedication (interior of the house), washing the blood, turning one of the mattresses so that the blood trail is not visible, even washing a teddy bear and bedding in the washing machine”.
Furthermore, for research Romero Lugo seized Cristina’s cell phone and “answered messages to her eldest daughtersetting up a theater in which he pretended to be the victim in order to even arouse suspicion”.
The defendant was a fugitive for a couple of days, in which he visited the mother of his son – to whom he brought diapers -, a friend and finally stayed at his sister’s home, where he was arrested.
