The series ‘The Asunta Case’ premiered on April 26 and has once again put the focus on one of the most famous crimes in Spain. Asunta Basterra Porto, just 12 years old, was found dead on a forest track after a missing person was reported by her adoptive parents. Rosario Porto and Alfonso Basterra. The story ended up taking a turn and both parents were convicted of the murder as perpetrators of having sedated the little girl with pills and later suffocated her.
Basterra is still in prison serving her sentence, while Porto was found hanged in 2020 after having made several suicide attempts. The woman’s defense lawyer has spoken on this topic, José Luis Gutiérrez Arangurenin the program And now Sonsoles of Antenna 3 in which she has regretted all the time she spent incommunicado due to the Covid pandemic.
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“Unfortunately, there was a lot of time between the last so-called confessions and the death, because Rosario was transferred to the Brieva prison with the arrival of Covid and I no longer have personal and direct contact with her,” he assured, adding that “everything was a problem so we could go see her.” the psychologist, the psychiatrist and me“We were the support he had to stay alive in those conditions and in the end what we all knew was going to happen happened.”
She has criticized that with the previous suicide attempts, no one took her seriously and they claimed that she only wanted to attract attention, “people speak with astonishing joy and ease.” “What we all deduced in some way after learning of her death was to Rosario, in a horrible time of his life, they move her to a place that is inhospitable to her, far away without the little she has left. The only thing she had left was her psychiatrist, her psychologist and me hers. Everyone had left, had disappeared. Her friends stopped being friends, her family disowned her. And well, in those circumstances and with the dramatic loss of a daughter“I believe that a person in this world is worthless, frankly,” he lamented.
The host of the program, Sonsoles Ónega, asked him directly Who killed Asunta? “I would like to know, certainly not Rosario,” the lawyer responded forcefully, explaining that “there is not a single piece of evidence, not a single indication that points towards her. So that I may be understood, I am aware, there is a jury court that convicts and there is a superior court of justice of Galicia that upholds the conviction. Despite everything and without believing I’m smarter than anyone else, I say: Unjust and unjustified conviction”.
He has gone on to say that the idea that the real killer is still at large “It’s not that crazy”. “I always remember and said it from the first moment, that this was very similar to the case of Dolores Vázquez,” who “was convicted in all the instances to which she went, and in the end there was the fortune that a chance discovery gave with the clue of who the murderer really was.”
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“Rosario did not have the opportunity or any motive,” he continued, criticizing that in order to clear his client’s sentence it was argued that “crimes do not have to have a motive.” “All that was speculated was, I am going to say it with complete frankness, crap”.
To demonstrate his thesis he has given the example of how they sought to justify the murder that the girl was in the way of, because she had a lover. “She was divorced, that lover sounds very bad to me, very stale. If it had been the other way around, probably that type of terminology would not have been used,” he began by commenting, to which he added that “I can guarantee that initial indication by initial indication were all refuted, they were not consolidated.”
“It was said that the girl had been deposited on Teo’s court at around 10 p.m. There are two gentlemen who have just left there, they said it actively and passively. the girl was not there. The girl had just been deposited when they had been at the police station for hours,” Gutiérrez settled, explaining other of the inconsistencies that, in his opinion, the trial had.
