Alex Trelinski
A JUDGE has thrown out a case where a Zaragoza woman going through a divorce was alleged to have put a knock-out drug in a croquette so that she could steal €27,000 from her husband’s bank account.
The court said that key video evidence of the ”poisoning’ at a bar produced images akin to ‘early television in the 1950s’ plus the judge concluding that the ‘victim’ did not behave like had been doped.
It had been alleged that the 48-year-old woman- named as Marta and a lawyer, met with her husband, Juan Carlos, at a bar in August 2022 to discuss their impending divorce.
That included sorting out financial matters and access rights to the couple’s children.
The story went that the husband left their table to buy a drink and she got hold of a croquette that he had ordered and put some benzodiazepine into it.
After eating the croquette, Juan Carlos claimed to feel unwell, and the couple left the premises for his new home at around 11.00pm.
Bank transfers were made en route via his phone, including €15,000 which went to one of his daughters.
The victim told Aragon police that he remembered nothing from the time he left the bar until the following morning.
He claimed that a total of €27,000 had been transferred to various accounts in his wife’s name.
The judge quizzed Juan Carlos as to why he continued to eat the croquette if he felt ‘it tasted so bad’ after the first mouthful.
His response was to say that he didn’t like to leave food on the plate.
The judge said that nearly two minutes of video footage from the bar- recorded directly from the screen by a police officer’s mobile phone- proved nothing.
The quality was so bad, he said, that the woman’s hands ‘look like stumps’ and all objects on the table looked like ‘simple stains’.
A medical report concluded that there were levels of alcohol and benzodiazepine in Juan Carlos’s urine, but the amount of drugs were not sufficient to cause ‘a high level of poisoning’.
Despite claims that he lost control, the court heard that he was busy the following morning and was awake at 10.00am and sent an email to his wife.
He went to four different places that morning before going to hospital for some tests at around noon.
