The National Court sentenced Galician Resistance leader Antonio García Matos to two years and one day in prison for giving the order and facilitating explosive device that another member of the terrorist organization placed in the Town Hall of Baralla (Lugo) on October 1, 2014 and that during its explosion it caused extensive material damage in the Town Hall and in various houses within a radius of 50 meters.
In the judgment, reported by Europa Press, the magistrates of the first section of the criminal chamber sentenced the accused to two years in prison for the offense of terrorist damage despite the fact that The prosecution had requested a sentence of 1 year and 6 months in prison. The magistrates explain that by virtue of the accusatory principle, the Chamber cannot pronounce a sentence higher than that requested by the public prosecutor, except when the sentence, as established by the doctrine of the Supreme Court, is omitted or not does not reach the legal minimum. provided for by law, in which case “the penalty must impose, in any event, the minimum penalty fixed for the offense for which the conviction was imposed”. Thus, applying this doctrine to the present case, the Chamber recalls that the offense of terrorist damage is punishable by a penalty of one to three years in prison and article 574 of the Penal Code specifies that those who commit it by acting serving or collaborating with terrorist organizations. They will be punished with the punishment in their upper half. “Accordingly, the accused is sentenced to two years and one day in prison“concludes the judgment, which grants the acquittal of the other accused of these events, Asunción Losada, taking into account the withdrawal of the prosecutor’s accusation at the beginning of the hearing.
It should be remembered that the prosecutor in charge of the case withdrew the accusation against Asunción Losada and reduced the sentence requested against García Matos during the same oral trial. The two leaders of Resistencia Galega refused to testify in court and the author – already convicted of these events – Raúl Agulleiro, maintained that would have attacked this town hall even if it was not a target of the organization since it was “my own decision” following the declarations against the victims of Francoism made months earlier by the mayor of this city.
The judgment indicates regarding this testimony that “it did not bring any new element of interest” to the case and is based on the consolidated jurisprudence of the Supreme Court in matters of intelligence reports to examine the probative value of the report prepared by the expert agents of the case. “The data found in these expert opinions provide evidence whose joint examination leads the court to conclude that it was Antonio García Matos who ordered Raúl Agulleiro Cartoy to attack the Baralla town hall and who provided him with the elements for the do,” he says. The prosecutor, during the hearing, reduced the sentence he had requested against García Matos by substituting the crime of terrorist devastation for that of terrorist damage, and emphasized that It was “obvious” that Agulleiro did not act on his own initiative, in accordance with “the totality of the evidence.”
In the proven facts of the sentence, presented by Judge María Riera, it is affirmed that Convicted leader ‘ordered ‘Raúl Agulleiro Cartoy’ to detonate explosive device at the Town Hall of (Lugo)“and for this”he provided him with the necessary materials to make the artifact (…) which was placed in a cellar in O Pedrouzo, municipality of O Pino (La Coruña)« .Details as Agulleiro He loaded the bomb into his father’s Volkswagen Golf at 12:30 a.m. on October 1, drove to Baralla and placed the pressure cooker with “four kilograms of explosive substance at the town hall “. of a pyrotechnic nature” on the left side of the entrance door. He scheduled the bomb to detonate at 4:45 a.m.
The resolution recalls that the explosion caused “serious damage, with the removal and total destruction of the entrance door, the removal of construction materials from the ground and the facade wall immediately around the object, cracks and displacements in the facade and the columns of the porch, and numerous projection impacts in all directions “Inside the building, demolitions, displacements, cracks, tearing of doors, breakages of. windows, falling false ceilings and damage to the furniture occurred”, he adds before explaining that “the damage caused was expertly valued at 222,488.32 euros.
