The first thing you see when you enter the compound where the Koh Phangan police station is located is a long line of foreigners waiting their turn to renew their visa. There are many tourists who cling to the beach loungers on this Thai island for months. Many know when they arrive, but not when they leave. In front of the immigration booth there is a huge green esplanade with an old white helicopter in the center. Further on is the main building. Inside, a team of talkative police officers has been working since the beginning of the month trying to solve all the mysteries of the most heinous crime in memory in this tourist jewel anchored in the Gulf of Thailand.
“We have no doubt that it was a premeditated murder and we have let the judge know that. We know that from the beginning, since we saw the videos of Daniel (Sancho) buying the tools to dismember the body and to clean the evidence “, admits to this newspaper one of the researchers.
This agent is the same one that last Monday drew us on a map the eight key places in the reconstruction of the crime, from the beach where the Spanish chef would have thrown the remains of the Colombian surgeon Edwin Arrieta, to the store where he bought the knives and the saw to skin the victim.
The Koh Phangan Police have a particular way of working, starting by opening the guts of the case to journalists in the middle of the investigation. This became clear when the EFE Agency correspondent was allowed to deal face to face with the detainee when he had already pleaded guilty. Or when Sancho was allowed to use his phone to talk with friends and respond to Instagram messages. Or when, as a reward for collaborating in the reconstruction of the events, they took him to dinner at the restaurant of the best resort on the neighboring island, Koh Samui, before the judge sent him to preventive detention.
The investigators leaked from the first moment that Sancho and Arrieta had a relationship. At first, their hypothesis, which they shared with the Thai media, was that it could be a jealous attack by the Spanish. But after the confession, the direction his investigations took pointed to a much more convoluted motive: Sancho, according to his version, was being extorted and threatened by Arrieta. The first wanted to break any relationship with the Colombian, who was opposed to it.
The chef maintained in his statement that he hit Arrieta in a fit and his head hit a sink, but the Police believe that this is a strategy to avoid being convicted of premeditated murder – the sentence is greater -, and as evidence clearer they expose the purchase of the knives, the cleaning products and the garbage bags a day before the doctor landed on the island. “He had it planned for months,” they say.
The Spaniard, despite denying it at first, ended up acknowledging that he had been having sporadic sexual relations with Arrieta for almost a year, who would have been paying, always according to investigation sources, the high train of life that the young man led (” He held me hostage. It was a glass cage, but it was a cage,” he said.
Sancho would also have pointed out that Arrieta threatened him with death. This is what the researchers tell EL MUNDO. The special envoy of El Periódico also recounted on Thursday that, on the Spanish mobile phone, now in the hands of the Police, these threats appear in an exchange of messages.
That is the part that the Spanish lawyers can now hold on to – along with the fact that it was not a premeditated crime – to try to ensure that the judge does not issue a life sentence in his verdict. According to Khun Anan, the Thai defense lawyer, Sancho was also afraid for the safety of his family because the doctor, according to the cook, had connections with the mafia in his country and was willing to do anything if the Spaniard would let him.
Arrieta’s family, angry at the return that, in their opinion, is being given to the case in many Spanish media, also posing Sancho as a victim, has denied everything.
“Who is defending us in Thailand? Nobody. They are making my brother look like a criminal. Everything they are saying about him is a lie, the extortion of the photos,” said Darlin, Arrieta’s sister, citing information that the Colombian would have extorted the Spanish with intimate images that he supposedly had in his possession. “I had the same phone as him (duplicate) and there were no photos of those. Daniel can say terrible things about my brother, but Edwin is not here to defend himself.”
Lecturas magazine published a conversation that Sancho had with his inner circle when he was already detained, reiterating the threats (“They were threatening both me and my family”) and justifying what he did because “he was defending” his life and “the one of the people that I love”.
There is an avalanche of information with an event that has fallen in the middle of summer. There are many details and messages that are appearing in the media day after day. The investigators have a period of almost three months to present the report with all the evidence before the judge.
Koh Phangan Police are overwhelmed with so much attention. They are not used to it, but it does not bother them. They are called from Spain at all hours, and the reporters and television cameras show up directly there. The doors of the police station on this small island are open to everyone.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
