Jubany Case: Laiglesia's defense wants to refute the DNA report and asks for more time from the courts
The lawyer of the accused requests from the judge of Sabadell more days to be able to present his defense brief
BarcelonaMore than two decades later, Helena Jubany's crime is on the verge of trial. Jubany's family's defense and the Public Prosecutor's Office have already submitted their briefs accusing Santi Laiglesia and requesting sentences of 26 years in prison. Now, one of the few steps remaining to set a date for the trial is for Laiglesia's lawyer to submit his defense brief. For now, however, the lawyer has requested more time to submit it. The reason? He is awaiting a counter-report on DNA to try and refute the evidence implicating the accused.
Laiglesia's defense has commissioned this expert report from a Canary Islands institute and is now requesting that all the data, files, and samples used by the National Police be sent there. Furthermore, it requests that the new deadline for submitting the defense brief be at least twenty days, not five as is currently the case, given the "technical complexity" of the case. In this regard, Laiglesia's defense points to the large "volume" of the case file, which amounts to more than 4,400 pages.
On November 30, 2001, Jubany was 27 years old and lived in the Creu Alta neighborhood of Sabadell. The previous year, she had moved from Mataró to start working at the Sentmenat library, and in the co-capital of the Vallès region, she began to be part of the Unió Excursionista de Sabadell (UES), where she met Laiglesia and the other individuals who have been suspects in the crime at some point over the last 25 years. Among them, Montse Careta, who committed suicide in prison a year after the crime. Careta was Laiglesia's partner and lived in the building where the crime occurred. Several witnesses have stated that the suspect also lived there, although he has distanced himself from the property, claiming he only spent some nights there. That Friday in 2001, in that apartment, Jubany was "definitively deprived of her freedom of movement and determination," to the point that she could never show up to start her shift at work on Sunday, December 2, at 3 p.m.
The key evidence
The accusations agree that before 4:45 AM on December 2, it was when one or more people gave Jubany benzodiazepines "in the quantity necessary to prevent her from having the physical or psychological capacity necessary to flee the place where she was." Afterwards, this person or group of people took advantage of Jubany's "absolute inability" to defend herself or flee the apartment to take her up to the building's rooftop. There they stripped her and threw the young woman off the roof, who died from the impact of the fall. Jubany's clothes were left very close by and set on fire with cologne. It is in the sweater the victim was wearing before she died that DNA has been found that would match Laiglesia's.