The Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice dismissed an appeal filed by the Public Ministry that sought to annul the acquittal issued in favor of two accused of participating in the murder of 5 fishermen.
That decision is contained in sentence 078 drafted by magistrate Maikel Moreno Pérez. The Chamber recalled that the events were revealed on January 17, 2021 when they found three decomposed corpses shot inside a curiara on the banks of the Orinoco River at the height of the El Catural sector, Bolívar, which adjoins the San Francisco farm. , being identified as José Manuel Castillo (59), Josbel Eliezer Flores (36) and Carlos Alberto Solórzano (45).
The remaining two bodies, corresponding to the dark-haired Alcides Rafael and Euclides Antonio Bolívar Hernández, aged 31, were buried in an improvised grave within the aforementioned farm, Angostura del Orinoco municipality (Ciudad Bolívar).
This group of fishermen left on January 12, 2021 from El Palmar del Orinoco, José Gregorio Monagas municipality (Mapire), limits of Anzoátegui and Bolívar.
As the intellectual author of this fact, the Public Ministry accused José Francisco Alfaro, owner of the farm where they found the Morochos Bolívar Hernández buried.
But the 2nd Trial Court of the Bolívar state acquitted him, according to a decision announced on February 17, 2022. The same acquittal was issued in favor of Néstor José Lira. Both received full freedom.
That same court issued a sentence of 19 years and three months in prison against those accused of killing the fishermen: Héctor Jesús Dimas, Richard Armando Rodríguez and José Manuel Herrera Lira. While José Augusto Lira, manager of the farm where the morochos were buried, was sentenced to 12 years and three months in prison.
The Public Ministry, represented by the prosecutor Marisol Josefina Carvajal Sosa and Edmundo Arlindo Márquez Becerra, attorney for the victims, asked the TSJ to annul said decision, an approach that had already been rejected by Chamber 1 of the Bolívar Court of Appeals.
The Public Ministry denounced that the 2nd Trial Court annulled as evidence the search carried out on the La Chatarrera Mileniun farm, owned by José Francisco Alfaro García, where “they seized evidence of criminal interest such as the incriminated 38-caliber firearm, which fired the shell collected at the time of the removal of the first three corpses, found in the curiara; absurd, unequivocal, and incongruous decision.”
For the magistrates, the two complaints by the Public Ministry were not “manifestly clear” since they fail to explain how the Court of Appeals misinterpreted the law when validating the sentence that convicted four and acquitted two. And for that reason, the Criminal Chamber dismissed the complaints of the Prosecutor’s Office and confirmed the sentence of the Bolívar Court of Appeals.
Based on that argument, it dismissed the appeal filed by the Prosecutor’s Office and consequently the convictions and acquittals were unscathed.
