A group of eight experts summoned by the Senate’s investigative commission has agreed that there is no conclusive evidence to confirm that the bullet that injured Víctor Hernández, a resident of La Paloma who was paralyzed in 2012, left the house of the then deputy commissioner from the town, Marcos Martinez.
The case has been analyzed by a commission that investigates the alleged irregularities that occurred in the Secretariat of the Ministry of the Interior between 2010 and 2017, when it was directed by the current Frente Amplio senator Charles Carrera. The Hernández episode is a central part of the parliamentary investigation.
Nationalist senator Jorge Gandini filed the complaint that led to the investigation and stated in an interview with the newspaper The country that all the technicians agreed that fundamental evidence is lacking to reach a conclusion about the origin of the shot. This would upset the official thesis on the matter, affirms the right-wing legislator.
The technicians pointed out to the senators that la bala who hurt Hernandez could never be removed from his body and that in the tests carried out it appears crushed and fragmented, which made it impossible to determine its caliber. The firing weapon could not be identified nor was any scabbard found at the crime scene.
The experts were only able to determine the position of the victim at the time of the shot, based on the testimony that Hernández provided to define a possible trajectory of the projectile.
Seven of the specialists were part of the Ministry of the Interior team that carried out the original expertise. One of them, Jorge Rodríguez Aguilar, stated that he had received pressure from the authorities of the Ministry of the Interior at the time to present a different report from the one that was presented.. He specifically singled out the director of Internal Affairs, Stella Gonzalez, with whom he said he had a very tough meeting on the subject. Rodríguez Aguilar withdrew from the portfolio shortly after that event.
Gandini insists that the basis is conjecture
The eighth expert to appear before the commission was the expert who made a report in charge of the Hernández family after the result of the original test. Washington Curbelo made a report without going to the place and based on the data provided by the victim and her family. Based on this information, the expert affirmed that the bullet had come from the policeman’s house. Martínez’s defense disputed this result, alleging that Curbelo was never established on the site and was unaware of the topography and scene.
Therefore, according to Gandini, everything is based on conjecture. The commission also received the results of a third expertise carried out last year at the request of the victim’s family before the Rocha Justice. However, this test with a dozen weapons of different calibers did not reach a definitive conclusion either.