A judge acquitted an imprisoned Mexican without trial for almost twenty years after being arrested for kidnapping with his partner at that time, Florence Cassez Francés, a case that had caused a diplomatic crisis between Mexico and Paris, the authorities announced on Friday.
“I’m still shock,” he simply recognized Israel Vallarta, leaving the federal prison of Almoloya, in the central state of Mexico, after kissing his family. His acquittal was pronounced on Thursday night, said Interior Minister, Rosa Icela Rodríguez.
A “television edition”
“A judge decided to free him,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said during a press conference on Friday morning. “We cannot forget how the arrest was,” he added, describing his live broadcast at the time of “television edition.”
Understood while he in 2005, Mrs. Cassez had been launched in 2013 after providing evidence that there had been procedural vices.
Mrs. Sheinbaum attributed the responsibility of this operation to Genaro García Luna, then director of the Federal Research Agency and Future Minister of Public Security in Mexico, currently after bars in the United States for her links with the powerful poster of Sinaloa.
This issue, emblematic of the slowness of criminal procedures in Mexico, is one of those that the government of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024) had presented a judicial reform that led to the unprecedented election of magistrates on June 1.
When ordering the release of Florence Cassez in 2013, the Supreme Court of Mexico had determined that she and her friend had been arrested and then taken to a farm where she had “staged her arrest”, according to a summary of the sentence.
“Terrible twenty years”
The French states that she was captured on a road south of Mexico City, then taken to the “Las Chinitas” ranch, where her arrest would have been simulated in front of various media. In an interview broadcast on Televisa in 2006, Genaro García Luna himself had recognized that the media had reached this property after the other.
At that time, the authorities said three kidnapping victims had been released from this ranch: an 11 -year -old boy, a woman and a man.
When he left the prison, Israel Vallarta said that he had met Luis Cárdenas Palomino, a former Mexican police officer accused of having tortured him during his arrest during his arrest and was arrested in 2021 in this case.
Lupita Vallarta, Israel’s sister, told AFP to be “very happy” of this result, while he was prey to “mixed feelings” after “terrible twenty years” of “combat” before the courts.
Source: BFM TV
