Judge Francisco de Jorge, of the National Court, decided to open a summary hearing and reject the statute of limitations in the case of Spanish businessman Manuel Terrén, accused of war crimes for his participation in blood diamond trafficking from Sierra Leone more than two years ago. decades. In an order to which elDiario.es had access, the magistrate contradicts the prosecution and explains that the accusations against Terrén, imprisoned for several weeks after his arrest in Malaga in July, have not expired and open the possibility of trying him for war crimes for, according to the complaint filed against him by a victim, having made his fortune with diamonds extracted from mines in Sierra Leone by slaves in the 1990s.
The complaint was filed in 2021, but the accused Spanish businessman, Manuel Terrén, was only located and arrested last summer. Judge De Jorge ordered him admitted to prison without bail due to the high risk of flight to Brazil, the country where he was residing at the time. It was the Criminal Chamber of the National Court which, three weeks later, annulled this decision on the basis of the arguments of the prosecution: Terrén has roots in Spain, suffers from an illness, has no criminal record and, according to the judges, “It would not be strange” if the events “were prescribed”.
The investigation, in recent months, has become a confrontation with the investigating judge and the prosecution defending the thesis contrary to the criminal chamber, the prosecution and the defense of the accused: that the facts have not prescribed and that the contents of a computer tapped during his arrest should even have been analyzed. In one of his recent writings, prosecutor Pedro Martínez Torrijos even predicted that, in this case, the possibility of this case leading to a conviction is “rather low”.
The judge decided that the case should move forward and rejected the expiration of the charges against Terrén, transforming the previous procedure into an ordinary summary and communicating his decision to the Criminal Chamber. The “criminal responsibilities” of the Spanish businessman “would not be prescribed” for the crimes attributed to him: war and against humanity. “The limitation period has not expired and due to the maximum penalty applicable, the proceedings must be dealt with in summary proceedings.” The civil war in Sierra Leone, explains the judge, took place between 1997 and 2002 but there are “reasons to believe that “the commercialization of diamonds resulting from the labor of civilian slaves could also have continued in 2003”.
blood diamonds
The civil war in Sierra Leone began in the early 1990s and for more than a decade the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) massacres left tens of thousands dead and two and a half million displaced. The coup group financed much of its civil war by extracting diamonds from the country’s mines using the slave labor of civilians they kidnapped.
In 2021, a victim of the war represented by lawyers Hernán Garcés and Juan Garcés, supported by the NGO Civitas Maxima, went to the National Court of Madrid against a Spanish businessman who, according to his version, would have profited of this sale and this traffic. of precious stones known as “blood diamonds” for their role in the war: Manuel Terrén.
According to the complaint, the businessman purchased the RUF diamonds through the Orfund group and then used a “business front” in Liberia to sell them in Antwerp. This is how he managed to overcome the main obstacle to the sale of diamonds: the UN embargo and restrictions aimed at preventing the sale of diamonds from financing the bloodbath in Sierra Leone.
In his jail warrant, which was later revoked, the judge said there was sufficient evidence to suspect that Terrén “profited from the sale of diamonds given to him by members of the RUF.” Diamonds from the Kono mines “where they were extracted by workers, forced to work in the mines by the RUF in slavery”. The judges did not question the accusations but released him taking into account “in particular the fact that more than 15 years have passed since the events”.
