The First Prison Sentencing Courtroom of Quetzaltenango started this Monday, Could 27, a trial for alleged disclosure of confidential info towards the previous anti-corruption prosecutor Virginia Laparra, the second for the previous official convicted and imprisoned in 2022 for abuse of authority, in a case criticized by the worldwide neighborhood.
Laparra, 44, was head of the Particular Prosecutor’s Workplace In opposition to Impunity within the western metropolis of Quetzaltenango and on December 16, 2022, she was sentenced to 4 years in jail in a controversial trial, accused of getting denounced a decide with out having the powers to take action.
Amnesty Worldwide (AI), which has adopted the proceedings towards Laparra, considers her a “prisoner of conscience” and assures that she was detained for her anti-mafia work. On January 4, the previous prosecutor was launched from jail on parole.
This second trial towards him started in a courtroom in Quetzaltenango with the studying of the costs by prosecutors, in line with native media broadcasts on social networks.
The Public Ministry (MP) and the plaintiffs within the case, together with former decide Lester Castellanos and lawyer Omar Barrios, accuse the previous prosecutor of getting leaked to the press in a 2017 listening to confidential details about a case of corruption, a punishable crime. with a penalty of as much as eight years in jail.
The MP has proposed 8 witnesses, together with journalist María José Longo, former collaborator of Free Press and at present a journalist for Agencia Ocote, and whom the prosecution known as as a witness. The publication that the accusers point out is a observe revealed by the journalist on July 5, 2017 on the web site of the defunct weekly elQuetzalteco.
The journalist was questioned by the prosecution and the complainants about how she obtained the knowledge to make the aforementioned journalistic observe and the target of publishing it, to which the journalist responded that “the target of all of the notes is to tell,” along with not bear in mind how he obtained the knowledge, as a result of greater than 7 years have handed.
Earlier than beginning the listening to, Laparra, in statements to native media, acknowledged that “the information are for requesting the suspension of a listening to,” however that “the MP needed to border it as a revelation of data.” He added that “lastly after a yr the controversy has been delayed, after seven years, so it’s constructive that it’s heading in the direction of the ultimate outcomes. I hope for an acquittal, in fact.”
The previous prosecutor was detained amid a wave of arrests and the exile of round thirty judges and former prosecutors who investigated infamous circumstances of corruption within the nation.
Final March, the president of Guatemala Bernardo Arévalo embellished Laparra and 24 different ladies with the Order of Labor Excellence, in an occasion held on the Nationwide Palace, throughout the framework of Worldwide Ladies’s Day.
With info from Lucero Salapú.
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