There are many gaps still to be clarified in the case of the woman arrested this week in Lleida for her alleged relationship with the death of her daughter, only 12 years old, whose body was found on June 3 in the drawer of a sofa in a Bucharest apartment where the mother had lived with her current partner.
The woman was arrested by the Mossos after receiving information from other Romanian citizens who had identified that woman, Simona, in the province of Lleida, whose photo appeared in the Romanian media, where this case has had a lot of media coverage.
Simona has just been released, however, by assuring that she knows nothing of this macabre crime. Yes, she has admitted that she was with her daughter in Bucharest during the Easter holidays. But she affirms, sources close to the case indicate, that she was convinced that the minor had returned with her father after spending those days together.
How do you justify this version? Simona has declared that at the end of the Easter holidays her partner, Marcel, told her that the girl's father had gone to that apartment in Bucharest to pick up the little girl. She was not in the apartment at that time and the girl's father had custody.
So Simona, if this version is true, was sitting the days after the crime -before traveling to Spain- on that sofa in whose drawer was already the body of her daughter, inside a plastic bag.
All eyes are now focused on Simona's current partner, whose whereabouts have been unknown since the beginning of May, when Simona and he left that rented apartment in Bucharest.
It was the owner of the house in which he raised the alarm when he entered the apartment and detected a strong stench. The corpse of the little girl carried in that sofa drawer for more than a month, in an advanced state of decomposition.
The Romanian police have issued an international search warrant against Marcel, now the main suspect in the crime if Simona's version is confirmed. The Romanian authorities would, in principle, consider her good since they did not oppose the release of this woman, who has indeed been under the judicial radar
Marcel is a man known in police circles for having starred in several violent episodes. One of them was arrested for hitting his mother. That man spent long periods of time outside of Romania, a country that he now assumes has left again.
