Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's legal team seeks 15 years for would-be assassin, partner

Lawyers representing former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in court have requested prison sentences of 15 years for two of the three persons accused of trying to assassinate her in 2022.

On the first day of the final pleas in the trial, Fernández de Kirchner’s lawyers also conceded that charges should be dropped against the third defendant. 

A sentence of attempted aggravated homicide was requested against Fernando Sabag Montiel, who pulled the trigger of a gun against Kirchner without the bullets going off, while his ex-partner Brenda Uliarte is accused of being a co-author.

In their final plea, the plaintiff’s lawyers then anticipated that they would not be accusing the third defendant, Nicolás Gabriel Carrizo, since they understood that there was no direct evidence linking him to the attack. 

Lawyer Marcos Aldazábal charged that Sabag Montiel and Uliarte "acted as functional co-authors" of the failed assassination attempt, highlighting that in his statement at the trial, the former "basically confessed … while declaring himself to be aware of what he was doing."

The plaintiff’s lawyer considered the attempted homicide charge should be aggravated by use of a firearm and gender violence. 

Aldazábal began his plea in the final stage of the trial with harsh criticisms of the investigation into the assassination attempt, considering that the judge in charge had "obstructed" the search for possible masterminds of the crime connected with Fernández de Kirchner’s political rivals. 

"We have seated [in the dock] the material authors but not the ideologues and the financiers," Fernández de Kirchner had said during her statement at the trial last year.

As for the third defendant, Carrizo, who was singled out as the "planner," Aldazábal pointed out: "There are no elements for us to accuse him today."

Regarding Carrizo, he explained that he would not be accused by the plaintiff’s lawyers and that upon consulting the point with Fernández de Kirchner, she expressed herself against using criminal law "for politics," saying: "If we don’t have to accuse him, don’t."

On the evening of September 1, 2022 Sabag Montiel pulled the trigger twice at the head of the ex-president without the gun going off.

He had infiltrated her sympathisers who congregated daily in front of her house in order to support her during a trial for corruption.

The ex-president was sentenced to six years in prison in that case with a lifelong disqualification from public office, a conviction upheld last June. 

She is currently serving her sentence under house arrest.

The trial of the failed assassination attempt will continue next Wednesday with the pleas of the prosecutors.

– TIMES/AFP