The members of the jury have delivered their verdict after two days of deliberations. The accusations ask that he be sentenced to permanent reviewable prison
The court of the jury that has judged Francisco Javier Almeida for the crime of the Lardero child, he has been found guilty. This was unanimously estimated by the nine members of the jury, who made their verdict public this Thursday, at the Provincial Court of Logroño, after two days of deliberations.
After the verdict, the case awaits the sentence imposed by the magistrate-president of the court according to the opinions of the jury. Both the Prosecutor’s Office and the private and popular prosecution requested, in their final conclusions, that he be sentenced to a reviewable permanent prison and 15 years in prison for the crimes of murder of a minor and sexual assault, respectively.
It will be the third sentence for Almeida, 55, for similar crimes, since he was already sentenced in 1993 to seven years in prison for sexually assaulting a minor. Upon his release from prison, in 1998, he reoffended again and raped and murdered a 26-year-old real estate agent in Logroño with whom he had arranged to show him a flat.
For this crime and sexual assault, he was sentenced to a total of 30 years. He served 21 years in prison and went out again in April 2020, after Penitentiary Institutionsdespite the unfavorable report issued by the Treatment Board of the prison in which he was located -El Dueso, in Santoña (Cantabria)- decided to grant him the third degree.
Almeida was released on probation and settled -in a rented apartment next to a park and a school- in Lardero (Logroño), a town where, on October 28, 2021, committed the acts for which he has now been tried. That afternoon/night, nine-year-old Álex celebrated Halloween disguised as the exorcist’s girl in the Entre Ríos park while his parents ate dinner at a nearby picnic area. Almeida took the boy from the park. A four-year-old girl who was playing with him notified the parents and gave indications about the man she had left with. Although the family and the police services quickly activated the search for him, when the agents went to Almeida’s building, he was already going down the stairs with the dead child in his arms.
“Have no doubt that this individual, the moment he sets foot on the street again, he will do it again. For Álex and for all the victims of this barbarian, of this heartless, of this ruthless being, I ask you please, forcefully, for that guilty verdict”, the prosecution lawyer, Alicia Redondo, asked the jury in her last intervention , in which he defined Almeida as “the vilest personification of evil” and “a sexual predator that satisfies your most disgusting desires.”
The prosecutor, Enrique Stern, for his part, described him as a man of “extreme cold blood.” “These days that we have been seeing some horrible photographs, that we have been listening to the father, that even the psychologist began to cry… Have you ever seen any regretful gesture of Mr. Almeida? Have you ever seen him sad? Have you noticed that I had any anguish because of what we were seeing in the photographs? Have you seen any gesture of empathy with respect to the parents?” She said about his lack of affectation.
According to the criteria of
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