Judge Maria Noel Tonarelli decided to suspend the hearing on Thursday for Operation Ocean and postpone it to February following a brief presented by lawyers Pablo Barreiro, Carlos and Alejandro Balbi, Jorge Pereira Schurmann and Andrés Añasco. In the request, they argued that given the extension of the investigation – the judge granted the prosecution six more months to investigate – and the difficulties they had in accessing more than 50 files with evidence, they should have more time to analyze the information.
At the hearing that was to be held tomorrow at 9 a.m., they were going to take an advance statement from one of the victims of the case. Prosecutor Mariana Alfaro must file an accusation before May 13.
“The Prosecutor’s Office did not grant access to all the evidence collected by itself, flagrantly violating the guarantees of our defendants and the rest of the accused, causing them total defenselessness and not allowing us to carry out a defense in accordance with the law“, indicated a group of defense lawyers who, through another letter published by El País and agreed to The Observer, they asked the Court Prosecutor’s Office to investigate the omissions of the former prosecutor in the case, Darviña Viera. In another passage, they added: “The principle of objectivity and good faith that govern the duty of prosecutors to proceed during the entire investigation was violated.”
They assured that, after the violations demonstrated, It corresponds to investigate Viera and her team for the crimes indicated in articles 162 and 164 of the Penal Code that correspond to abuse of functions and continual omission of the duties of the position.
The documents that Viera had not delivered include records of the seizure of 17 respondents, eight witness statements in cases of different victims, 27 arrest notifications, two captures of conversations between respondents and victims, a folder with migratory movements of a victim, migratory movements of a witness, 13 certificates of non-attendance of victims to psychological tests, nine certificates of non-attendance of witnesses to those tests, and four tests carried out on those investigated.
In turn, three folders containing a photographic survey of the conversations between victims and those investigated, BPS reports referring to companies of the accused, testimonies of the victims’ birth certificates, and a record of a cannabis club linked to one of those investigated.
