Prosecutor and private prosecution maintain the request for penalties for those prosecuted for the crime of Juan Carlos Tejera

The five defendants in the homicide of Juan Carlos Tejera, who died from blows in 2015 in Lanzarote, face requests for between 14 and 25 years in prison, as the prosecutor and the lawyer for the victim's family maintain their charges of murder with cruelty, despite the allegations of their defenses, which maintain that there is no evidence to incriminate them.

In the opinion of the defenses, when presenting the alleged indications of guilt, the accusations have "tried to tailor a suit", but without success, because "all the seams are visible", as argued by one of the lawyers in the seventh and last session of the trial held before a Jury by the Las Palmas Court to determine whether or not they committed these crimes.

Claiming "the free acquittal" of their representatives, José Carlos C.H., Angelo D.D. and Juan Antonio D.R., the lawyer has stated that, after witnesses, police officers who investigated what happened and forensic experts who performed the autopsy on the victim's body have appeared day after day to testify, the conclusion is that "there is no evidence" that accuses the defendants.

"And much less sufficient incriminating evidence or legitimately obtained in accordance with the legal system," he added.

Faced with their theses, the representative of the Public Prosecutor's Office has stated that the involvement of the five men was confirmed from the moment there was "a milestone in the investigation", which was "the discovery of a clear fingerprint" of one of them in a deceased's SUV where his corpse was transferred to hide it in a remote cave in the vicinity of a garbage dump.

Monitoring the movements that they all carried out in the days before and after the moment in which the victim was reported missing, "in the early morning of March 12 to 13, 2015", allowed to collect, according to what he said, sufficient indications of their guilt.

This seems to have been shared by the lawyer of the private prosecution, exercised by the relatives of the deceased, arguing that information provided by transport and telephone companies to which they consulted places them at the scene of the crime through the trace of the signal from their mobiles and confirms that they traveled to Lanzarote expressly from other islands and that, in order to avoid suspicion, they did so "in a staggered manner" and not on the same day.

The defenses have rejected these arguments, alleging that one of their clients who was planning to travel with two others postponed the departure at the last moment because he was already under a conviction for past events that established that to travel he needed a judicial authorization that he could not obtain in time.

And he pointed out, regarding the data relating to the situation of their telephones brandished by the accusers, that "they were not referring to the exact situation of the mobiles, but to the location of the antennas" that received their signals.

The reason is that when investigating them "the triangulation was not done" of their trace, using cross-referenced information from various records to determine precisely where the devices of each one were, settling for verifying that they connected with the antenna that covers the area in which the cave used to hide the body is located, when it turns out that "it is next to the Arrecife courts" and that its radius of action is much wider, so it is not something conclusive.

Despite the opposition of that lawyer and the defenders of the other two defendants, Néstor David P.P. and Antonio Enrique G.G., the prosecutor and private prosecutor have insisted on attributing what happened to them and on classifying the events as a crime of murder with cruelty, also attributing to the latter another of illegal detention because the police investigations carried out indicate that their initial purpose was to capture him alive and hold him in the cave where his corpse was found.

These plans were truncated, however, when Juan Carlos Tejera confronted them when they went to catch him, whom they ended up hitting until he died, deciding then to bury him in the cave that they had prepared to imprison him, and in which, to that end, they had prepared a stake, a ring fixed with concrete to the ground, apparently to chain him to it, and even a tent, as was discovered when the body was finally found, more than a week after searching for him and with the help of canine guides, according to the account of the accusations.

The charges have also been maintained for a woman, Tania R.R., who is accused of complicity with the alleged murderers, because the prosecutor's office and the victim's family believe it is proven that she helped in various procedures and in trying to cover up the crime.

Whether they are guilty or not will now be decided by a Jury constituted for this purpose and whose deliberations begin after the presentation of evidence and allegations of the trial has concluded.