Polop mayor's murder trial begins
Mayor Alejandro Ponsada was shot dead outside his home in October 2007
THE TRIAL over the murder of late Polop mayor Alejandro Ponsoda has finally begun at Alicante Provincial court this week - over 12 years after the shooting took place.
Sitting in the docks are main suspect and Sr Ponsoda successor Juan Cano, three other local businessmen (one the owner of a brothel in La Cala Finestrat) accused of planning the murder, an allegded contract killer and two Czech nationals accused of carrying out the crime.
Sr Cano has insisted he is innocent.
THE MURDER case of Polop mayor, Alejandro Ponsoda, is currently being heard in a jury trial at Alicante's Provincial Court, 12 years after he was murdered in in his car outside his home in Xirles on the evening of October 17, 2007.
First on the stand were the three alleged hitmen accused of the shooting that ended the life of PP mayor Ponsoda.
The accused are Spaniard Raúl Montero, and two Czech nationals Radim Rakowski and Robert Franek.
All three denied in court that they were hired to carry out the murder, and they all claim to not know Juan Cano, Ponsoda’s replacement as mayor, who is charged with ordering the hit. They also said they did not have access to purchasing the weapons used in the killing.
Both the public and the private prosecutors are accusing them of shooting the mayor and the illegal possession of weapons, requesting prison sentences adding up to 27 years of internment of each one of them.
The four who allegedly planned the killing are the former mayor of Polop Juan Cano, shoe store entrepreneur Salvador Ros and those in charge of the Mesalina Club in Finestrat, Pedro Hermosilla and Ariel Gatto.
All three alleged hitmen worked at the club as bouncers and sometimes worked collecting debts. They had access to illegal weapons as in the past they had been arrested for offences linked to firearms.
Raúl Montero was sentenced to five years in prison for drug trafficking and illegal possession of firearms in December 2009 after five guns and drugs were found hidden in his car. Guns, shotguns and ammunition were found in the Paterna apartment were the two Czechs were living.
Although Raúl Montero had originally declared that Salvador Ros repeatedly proposed that he kill Alejandro Ponsoda, in court this week he said everything he declared in his first court appearances was the result of the coercion by officers from the Guardia Civil's elite UCO unit who have been leading the investigation into the murder.
"They have made my life impossible and threatened me and my family," he said during the trial. "If I could have said say something in the past that harmed other people, it was because I was threatened" and that officers gave him ‘a prefabricated story"’ in which he was told what he should answer ‘if he wanted his life in jail to be easier’. He claimed that during these sessions officers placed a photo of Juan Cano in front of him.
He also denied fleeing Benidorm after Ponsoda's death, as stated in the investigation, saying that at that time he was appearing twice a week in a Benidorm court that had charged him for drug trafficking.
One of those court appearances was made the same day Ponsoda was shot outside his house in Xirles.
The two Czech citizens declared that the day of the crime they were in Chueca at a friend's house and that they had never been to Xirles or Polop, nor did they know anything about the mayor's murder. Both admitted to working as bouncers in hostels in La Estrada, between Benidorm and Alfaz, some of them run by the same management as the Mesalina.
Rakowski said he did not sell weapons, was not responsible for debt collection, nor did he ask for any money for the murder. He maintained that when the court allowed him to have bail, he could not pay it because he had no money.
According to his version, on the day of his arrest the UCO officers surrounded him and put a gun to his head, which is why he refused to testify before them. Later in prison, officers went to visit him to coerce him into involving Juan Cano.
Along the same lines, Robert Franek said that the UCO officers came to question him without a lawyer and that he had gone days without food and was told 'you're a f..king assassin, you're not worth anything.'
Later they went to see him in prison to ask him to involve others. Franek said that in 2008 he was working as a bouncer at Mesalina, where he coincided with the protected witness who implicated him in the murder.
The court case continues.