Attack on Cristina Kirchner: doubts about Sabag Montiel’s cell phone, who will remain in preventive detention

Two years after the attempted murder of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchnerthe oral trial resumed with the testimony of the police officers who intervened on the night of September 1, 2022. Without contradictions between them, the witnesses recounted how the militants “handed over” Fernando Sabag Montiel, the moment when he was handcuffed, the attempts to turn on the accused’s cell phone – which had no battery – and the first tests in the tent set up in front of the former vice president’s apartment.

Likewise, the country’s highest criminal court upheld the preventive detention of Sabag Montiel, Nicolás Carrizo and Brenda Uliarte. Chamber II of the Federal Court of Criminal Appealsmade up of the judges Angela Ledesma, Guillermo Yacobucci and Alejandro Slokarconfirmed on Wednesday the preventive detention of those accused of the attempted murder of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Although the Oral Court had ordered the extension for one year, judges Ledesma and Yacobucci reduced the term of the measure to six months and demanded speed when the oral and public trial is in full swing.

The night of the attack

He Federal Oral Court 6 On Wednesday, Matías Gabriel Fernández, Pablo Gabriel Codina, César Augusto López Rinaldi, Maximiliano Josué Arias Correa and Pablo Eduardo Fumega were heard. All of them were Federal Police officers who had some kind of intervention the night that Sabag Montiel He pointed a gun in Cristina’s face.

Under questioning from all sides, the officers corroborated under oath the story of the militants who had already testified in this trial about how the attacker was subdued and everything that happened in those minutes after the assassination attempt, in a climate of extreme tension.

Rinaldiwho had been summoned to the place to control the security operation as a routine, was the one who approached the pile that had occurred when the militants reduced Montiel. He said that at first he thought it was a simple incident, until he heard a warning that put him on alert. “He has a gun!” he said the young men who had caught him shouted at him. He said that at that moment he pushed the boy away. Sabag Montiel “to protect him,” he warned that he was wounded and told him that he was a militant who supported Cristina. According to his recollection, he felt him and did not find any weapon, until he was told that the Bersa 22 caliber was on the ground and also guarded by another militant.

The account of the events of all the officers coincided, except for one detail that the defendant’s defense and the prosecution itself sought to resolve. One of the police officers had declared in the investigation that once Sabag was subdued, in a gazebo that they had set up at that time as part of the operation, they had tried to turn on the “male’s” cell phone, which one of his colleagues had “manipulated” for that purpose, but they had not succeeded.

The defense noted that the witness had not been clear when testifying on this point. After a controversy settled by the court, the police officer confirmed his statements. That is, there were no flaws in the actions of those first minutes after the attack and everyone pointed out that the phone was out of battery. Everyone also agreed that the accused did not have the physical ID, but that he had it in the Mi Argentina application, but that they could not access the document, precisely because “the screen was completely black”, since it had no more battery.

This is the device that mysteriously appeared to be factory reset when it was opened in the judge’s office. Maria Eugenia Capuchettitogether with prosecutor Carlos Rívolo.

The breaking of the chain of custody of the phone, which was the key piece of evidence in the case, is part of another investigation in which it has not yet been clarified who manipulated it to erase its content.

The witnesses also recounted how the scientific police carried out the first work on Sabag Montiel. Taking samples from their hands, temperature control, etc. The questions about those maneuvers were accompanied during the hearing with the exhibition of images of Sabag Montiel in the aforementioned tent, half naked and handcuffed, at the time of his arrest.