guilty This was unanimously agreed by the Barcelona Court of Appeal yesterday. The jury considers it proven that the accused, John Musetescu, of Swedish nationality, committed the three crimes in less than an hour. On the afternoon of January 20, 2020, the convict took the lives of a woman and two men, among them the municipal worker of Barcelona City Council and journalist David. The jury has rejected the exemption of mental disorder raised by his defense and also that of drug use.
By virtue of the jury's verdict, the court will now have to issue a sentence for this case, in which the Prosecutor's Office is asking for 95 years in prison for three crimes of murder, in addition to one crime of arson, three for thefts with violence, another for an attempted robbery with intimidation and threats and one for injury.
On January 20, 2020, the accused entered a man's flat at around three in the afternoon and, without knowing the reason, murdered him by stabbing him 249 times before slitting his throat and suffocate him with a bag tied over his head. After that, he set fire to the flat in order to erase his prints and tracks, which forced the neighbors to evacuate the building, thus putting their lives at risk.
He then jumped out of the building's window into the street, killing a 66-year-old woman coming out of a nearby doorway by smashing her head against the wall with "great brutality", according to the jury's verdict .
He then stole a motorcycle from a delivery man, tried to rob a store with a large knife and, finally, in that bloody journey, he moved to Plaça Sant Jaume, where, in an adjacent street, he assaulted two fatal stab wounds to his last victim, a municipal worker who was leaving work, and he also wounded a colleague.
In its verdict, the jury stated that there are "multiple indications" that point to the defendant as the author of the three murders. The jury underlines that the accused perpetrated the first of his crimes with "unnecessary suffering" for the victim, since he "got into it", while in the second of the murders, that of the woman, he to have "great brutality", as evidenced by the goals received.
The jury's decision is based on the different evidence presented at the trial, such as witness statements or images recorded by a witness or by the security cameras of hotels or businesses in the area and the objects he was carrying, stolen from the victims, or the blood on their shoes.
The mental disorder exemption has been rejected and so has the mitigating factor for drug use. On the other hand, the court has also unanimously denied the possibility of granting him a pardon. Once the verdict was read, the prosecutor maintained his prison sentence and requested the court to keep the accused in prison until the sentence is handed down, given the "risk of criminal recidivism" and because of the "extreme brutality" of the murders he committed.
