The Supreme Court suspended the oral trial once morest the Los Gallegos clan, the operational arm of the Aragua Train in northern Chile, which had begun this Monday in the Oral Criminal Court (TOP) of Arica, and ordered it to carry out a new hearing to evaluate the technical feasibility of the process taking place in person.
Last week, the Arican Court of Appeals had accepted an appeal for protection from the Public Criminal Defender’s Office in favor of 19 of the 38 defendants, so that they might physically attend the TOP. But given the concern regarding the transfers, given the dangerousness of the accused since, for the same reason, they are serving preventive detention in six different prisons – some 3,000 kilometers away -, the Public Ministry and the State Defense Council appealed to the Supreme.
In this context, the country’s highest court had issued an order not to innovate, freezing in-person attendance and allowing the trial to begin this Monday online, as requested by the Prosecutor’s Office.
Likewise, the Supreme Court pointed out that “at the hearing of the appeal, it was also made known that some of the protected persons who are being held in the Valparaíso prison have not had communications with their defense, due to technical impediments that must be resolved.” .
For this reason, it also ordered that “The Gendarmerie must adopt the measures that are conducive to ensure due communication of the protected persons who are serving the precautionary measure of preventive detention in the Valparaíso prison, with their defense lawyers.”
The Arica Regional Prosecutor’s Office takes 38 members of Los Gallegos to oral trial – four Chileans and the rest foreigners, mostly Venezuelans – and requests life imprisonment for 11 of them, in addition to other sentences that total more than 200 years in prison for the rest.
The accusation includes 22 criminal acts, among which there are seven homicides (six qualified) recorded during 2022: in three the criminals buried their victims in different areas of the Cerro Chuño sector.
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