Three Dominican narco war crimes in Barcelona go to trial

BarcelonaCacon and Mayol were the nicknames used by the two brothers who led a gang of Dominican drug traffickers operating in the Barcelona metropolitan area. The police have never found Mayol but they have located and arrested Cacon, who will sit in the dock at the Audiencia de Barcelona with three other men: two members of his group, Nono and Argenis, and one from the rival gang, Andrés. According to the prosecution, the brothers' organisation devised a plan to "reassert and protect" its power and exact revenge against the opposing group. This Dominican metropolitan narco war left six murders between 2016 and 2017. Now half of them are being tried.

The three crimes that the jury will have to assess - five women and four men chosen on Wednesday - took place in 2017: the first murder was at the end of March in a Sant Joan Despí open field and the other two at the end of April in a flat in Prat de Llobregat. The Prosecutor's Office asks for revisable permanent imprisonment for the four defendants and wants this sentence to be triple for Cacon and double for Andrés. The defendants, however, will be the last to speak at the trial, which begins this morning with the first expert witnesses, followed later in the day by witnesses - some police and some protected - ballistics experts and forensic experts.

The plan of the gang of the Dominican brothers was to kill people from the rival organization with firearms. They wanted to respond in this way to a violent assault they received on March 25, 2017 in the early hours of the morning at their operational centre, in Barcelona's Paral·lel, also the home of the two leaders. That day, Cacon, Mayol, Nono and Argenis knew that one of the members of the group had betrayed them because he had given information for the assault and the key to the house. Without him being aware that he had been discovered, they summoned him near Paral·lel and took him to an isolated area of industrial buildings in Sant Joan Despí. According to the prosecution, the defendant shot him in the head. The victim's hands were tied behind his back and his head was covered with a sack. The body was found on 28 March.

Another treacherous exchange

The prosecution assures that Cacon continued with the revenge to kill the other people who had participated in the assault. That is why he contacted Andrés, the fourth defendant, who betrayed the rival gang and became a collaborator for Cacon to carry out the plan. Without leaving the organisation from which he came, Andrés provided photographs of the members who could be targets and information about what they were up to. This is how they learned that the leader of the opposing group, aware that he was in danger, had moved to a flat he considered safe in El Prat de Llobregat with some of his allies. On the night of 27 April they went to the home in the Sant Cosme del Prat neighbourhood with firearms and fired seven shots: at the person who opened the door and in the living room where the rest were.

The shooting left two men dead. One was shot in the head and the other in the back and head. A third person was wounded by a gunshot wound to the neck. According to the prosecutor's office, the victims in El Prat, like the one in Sant Joan Despí, were unable to defend themselves. For this reason, the case is classified as three murders with malice aforethought and one attempted murder by the injured person. Criminal offences of illegal possession of weapons and membership of a criminal organisation are added. For Cacon the prosecutor's office is requesting for triple permanent revisable prison for the three deaths and 20 more years in prison for the attempted murder, for Nono and Argenis a single sentence of permanent revisable prison for the crime of Sant Joan Despí and for Andrés a double sentence of permanent revisable prison and 20 more years in prison for the two deaths in El Prat and the attempted murder.