Skip to main content

Tourists face death penalty in Malaysia for murder

Two Chilean tourists facing the death penalty in Malaysia for allegedly murdering a man in a hotel are innocent and acted in self-defence, their lawyer said Monday.
Felipe Osiadacz and Fernando Candia are on trial over the killing of a Malaysian in the lobby of the Kuala Lumpur hotel in August last year, less than 24 hours after they arrived in the country on holiday.
The young men have pleaded not guilty. Malaysia has a mandatory death penalty for murder, and if convicted the pair will be hanged.
“It was all an accident. A person went into the hotel and demanded money from them,” their lawyer Venkateswari Alagendra told reporters at the Kuala Lumpur High Court after a hearing.
The Malaysian man then attacked the Chileans and they fought back in self-defence, before calling the police, she said.
She said she was confident that the pair, who went on trial earlier this year, would be acquitted.
Two women were seen hugging the men after Monday’s court hearing, but declined to speak to reporters.
The trial resumes on September 24.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trial of 24 in Congo over killings of UN experts resumes

The trial of 24 people, including a former intelligence agency informant, suspected in the killings of two UN sanctions monitors in 2017 in central Congo resumed on Monday after a 10-month suspension, defence lawyers said. Zaida Catalan, a Swede, and Michael Sharp, an American, were killed in March 2017 while investigating an armed conflict in Democratic Republic of Congo’s Kasai region between government forces and the local Kamuina Nsapu militia. Congo’s government has blamed their kidnappings and killings on the militia but some Western governments and rights groups suspect state officials may have been involved as Catalan and Sharp were conducting investigations in an area where the United Nations has accused Congo’s military of war crimes. Congolese government officials initially said no state agents were involved in the killings and that they did not know at the time that the two experts were in the region. But they later said they could not exclude the possibility state ...
Post a Comment
Read more

UK returns £70m to Nigeria

As British Prime Minister Theresa May visits Nigeria and two other African countries this week, the country reported it had returned £70 million recovered from a Nigerian, who was convicted of fraud by an Italian court. The British High Commissioner to Nigeria, Mr Paul Arkwright, said in Abuja: “There was an Italian court case with a particular person involved. A portion the fund has been in the UK and that was the portion that was returned recently from the UK to Nigeria.’’ The envoy did not mention the identity of the Nigerian involved in the offence, but said more funds would be repatriated. He stressed that his country was working with the Nigerian government to accelerate the legal process of returning the looted money. “The British government has no intention of keeping one kobo of Nigerian funds in the UK. It all must come back to Nigeria. “Just as in Nigeria, the UK feels that the judicial process is important, and we have to go through those processes before the mon...
Post a Comment
Read more