The Provincial Court has imposed a sentence of just two years in prison for two people arrested in 2015 at the Torre de la Horadada yacht club, with a stash of 389 kilos of cocaine seized from their boat.
The defendants, a 79-year-old man and his 52-year-old son, spent nearly four months in jail following their arrest but now they will not have to return to prison because the court has granted them a stay of execution at the request of their defence lawyer, Moisés Candela Sabater.
The Prosecutor’s Office, which has not appealed the ruling, requested that both be sentenced to nine years in prison and a fine of 14.5 million euros for the value of the cocaine, but the Court has upheld the mitigating request of lawyer Moisés Candela because of undue delays and has reduced their sentence to two years in prison, since they both lacked a criminal record.
The events took place on January 29, 2015 at the yacht club in the Pilareño district of Torre de la Horadada. A member of the club saw that a docked pleasure boat was listing, and he could see some suspicious packages. He notified the manager of the yacht club who contacted the Civil Guard.
After obtaining the consent of the boat owner’s son to inspect the vessel, agents located 13 bales containing a total of 390 packages of cocaine. The net weight of the drug was 389 kilos, with a purity of 70.1% and a valued on the illicit market of 14,536,587 euros.
The two defendants said that they received payment of 130,000 euros for transporting the drugs into the Torre de la Horadada marina from a point about 31 nautical miles off the coast of Santa Pola.
The bundles of drugs were attached to a floating plastic drum. They returned to port during the early hours of January 28 and the next day the cache was discovered.
The Court that tried the case said that, despite being a case that lacked complexity, there have been undue delays of more than eight years that are not attributable to the accused and therefore the sentence should be reduced accordingly.
