Witness discredited in Polop murder trial

FOUR years on from the 2007 murder of Polop’s Mayor Alejandro Ponsoda, and the case takes yet another negative twist.

The main witness on whose testimony seven persons were accused of the murder, has now been officially discredited by the presiding judge.

Amongst those arrested, and subsequently acquitted, were Juan Cano, who following the murder, succeeded Sr. Ponsoda as the town’s mayor.

At the time of the witness giving evidence back in 2007, he was already a “protected” witness in the matter of another police investigation into a drugs and racketeering gang operating in the Benidorm area, known as ‘Operation Muscles’, due to it being to do with the manufacture and smuggling of anabolic steroids.

Thanks to phone-taps that were in place for the unrelated drugs operation, the exact movements and telephone conversations of the witness over the relevant period of the murder case were recorded in detail.

Now some four years later it has emerged through cross referencing the evidence in the two separate crimes, that there are inconsistencies in the testimony of the Polop murder case witness. Basically, what he said to police in one investigation contradicts his evidence in the other.

The contradictions include his whereabouts at certain critical times, and what he claims to have said to different people. Once a witness is discredited in this way it proves impossible to rely on his testimony – in either case – and so the judge had no option but to dismiss the case which relied so heavily on his testimony.

“We know almost all of the movements of the movements of the protected witness (during the relevant dates), and there is little doubt he lied,” stated one of the accused’s lawyers in the murder case, following the judges summary and dismissal.

The mayor is still dead, and no one has been successfully tried for the crime. The investigation is back to square one, but more is still to come in this ongoing case.

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