Charlie Smith
A UK primary school has unwittingly hired a convicted child murderer from Spain’s Andalucia as a teaching assistant.
Iria Suarez Gonzalez, 35, was arrested after she and a friend killed a 16-year-old schoolgirl in 2000 by slitting her throat and stabbing her 32 times.
Klara Garcia was stabbed to death by her classmates Suarez and Raquel Carlet Torrejon, who were at the time 16 and 17 years old respectively.
Garcia was killed in a field in San Fernando, Cadiz, after the pair wanted to know ‘what it would feel like to kill someone’, according to media reports from the time.
Suarez was then able to work for 10 months at West Oxford Primary School, in affluent suburb Osney, by exploiting a loophole, meaning she did not have to expose her criminal past.
She was released from prison in 2006, applied for the job in April 2016, and started five months later in September.
She left the school, which has 230 children, in July 2017, before an anonymous tip-off was made to Crimestoppers and the council were alerted in October.
In February 2018 she was then arrested and brought before Oxford Crown Court on charges of false representation.
She was to stand trial for not acknowledging the murder in her job application, but her case has now been dropped.
In Spain convictions by minors are wiped from their criminal record after 10 years, allowing Suarez to start a new life in the UK, as she had murdered her victim when she was 16.
The CPS dropped the case due to a lack of evidence, but the case has now been reported on after restrictions were lifted.
A CPS spokesperson said: “We keep all cases under continuous review so we can consider any new information that comes to light.
“In this instance, it emerged Ms Suarez-Gonzalez’s conviction was spent which resulted in the charges being dropped.”
An Oxford County Council spokesperson said: “Recruitment is not the responsibility of the council, it is the responsibility of the individual school.
“The school had followed safer recruitment processes in terms of the recruitment of this individual.
“There is a clear recruitment process in place for schools to follow in line with safer recruitment procedures.”
Following the murder, the Juvenile Court of Cadiz ordered the families of the two killers to pay €246,145 to the family of the victim, Garcia.
