In several weeks it will be the 13th anniversary of the murder and disappearance of Marta del Castillo , an anniversary that this year comes with one last hope for the family to recover the body of the young woman and finally be able to close a duel that began that fateful afternoon of the January 24, 2009. The new hope of the family is in the expert report that is being prepared for the Court of Instruction number 4 of Seville by judicial expert Manuel Huerta, CEO of the Lazarus company, who has been commissioned to clone the telephone cell phone that was seized from Miguel Carcano in the Seville-II prison, in Moron de la Frontera, among his personal belongings once he was arrested for the murder.
This mobile phone is the Motorola U9, from the old shell, and he has remained all these years held in the Seville-II prison until last May, when the prison administration handed him over to the National Police once the judge had authorized the practice of this test. It was Miguel Carcano himself, who in a letter sent to Marta’s family lawyer on August 2, 2020, Inmaculada Torres, offered his collaboration to clarify the “truth of what happened” and for this he even authorized the “review of his phone”.
“ It is the main telephone number on which we are working”,The judicial expert, Manuel Huerta, has assured this newspaper, who also explained what the work that is being done on this cell phone and six other terminals intervened consists of to the different people involved in the case. In any case, these are very old devices, which lacked a GPS position system, and among the mobiles under study, in addition to the Motorola U9, another Motorola W180, an LG KG 275, a Sony Ericsson k300i, and two other terminals stand out. unidentified Sony Ericsson and Siemens brands. All these devices are part of the so-called “conviction pieces” that were available to the Seventh Section of the Seville Court , which held the trial for Marta’s murder in 2011.
The expert points out that with this forensic technology it is possible to extract and analyze the “connection negotiation records” of the telephones with the repeater antennas –technically called handover– and to do this, they search for “all the time that the telephone had coverage with which antennas He was negotiating.”In 2009, when the crime was being investigated, the telephone operators offered the court the data that was requested: the connections of the antennas when the phones had traffic, that is, they made or received calls and text messages.
Thus,The movements of Miguel Carcano and the others involved were reconstructed, but now it is a matter of expanding the dotted lines that those movements drew, recovering some “intermediate points” through the antennas that were providing coverage to those devices. Manuel Huerta gives as an example that when the pin number of a mobile phone card is not entered, the terminal only allows emergency calls to be made, but that “means that it has coverage”. Emergency calls “if they have coverage” and those records are reflected in the antennas, adds Manuel Huerta.
With this new technique it is possible to specify the movements in a radius between 8 and 30 meters
The analysis of these records of connections of the telephones with the antennas,Together with the raw data of the telephones, it will allow expanding the information on the precision of the positions of the devices and also the information related to the position in the intervals in which no calls have been made or received. This could help clarify the presence or not of Carcano and the rest of those involved in certain locations or rule him out, as well as the routes they followed, the time spent in each of those locations and even identify if they have made the movements by car. or on foot
With regard to the precision that the analysis that is going to be carried out on the telephones may have, the CEO of Lazarus – a company that has participated in other media cases such as that of Diana Quer,where they helped unlock the young woman’s phone–, assures that it oscillates in a radius of between 8 and 30 meters , those eight meters being the “maximum rate of effectiveness” , which would allow the Carcano terminal and the others involved in that radius.
The judicial expert also studies the “mobile blackout” in two time slots
In this way, the analysis of the expert Manuel Huerta , who is currently finalizing, also tries to provide an answer to another of the unknowns that occurred on the night of the proceedings in relation to the “blackouts” of the mobile phones of those involved in two time slots directly related to the murder and the work to make the body of Martha. This disconnection of the devices occurred between 9:30 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. on the night of January 24, and between 1:30 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. the following morning, on January 25.
That supposed silence of the terminals of the four defendants was examined in depth by the sentence issued in January 2012 by the Court of Seville,that precisely took into account the location of the cell phone calls to consider proven that Marta’s body was taken from the home of Leon XIII around 10:15 p.m. on January 24, 2009, although the Supreme Court would correct to the Sevillian Court, estimating that the maneuvers carried out to transfer the body already took place at dawn the following day.
The expert analyzes seven cell phones of the time that did not have a GPS system like the current ones
The fact that Miguel Carcano received a call from Marta’s mother at 1:37 a.m. on the 25th and she was located in Camas does not disprove the testimony of Leon XIII’s neighbor who crossed paths with Miguel shortly before the two in the morning because “although the satellite signal places a mobile in a certain place, its user does not necessarily have to be next to it at all times”. And to all this, the “blackout” of the mobile phones of those involved between one and three in the morning is added.In this sense, Carcano’s phone was inactive, that is, he did not receive or make calls from 01:37 to 04:22 on January 25, moment in which his brother, Javier Delgado, called him, remembers the sentence of the Court of Seville.
Regarding the movements that he made on the day of events, the calls prove that around 5:53 p.m. on the 24th, Miguel called Cuco, placing the call at the BTS antenna on Arroyo Street, which confirms that he was with Marta in his neighborhood. At 00:11 on the 25th, Miguel called his friend Samuel Benitez; while Marta’s mother made that call at 01:37 and another one before, at 01:00. At 04:22 he receives a call from his brother Javier, and at 04:36 and 05:22,Miguel calls Marta’s cell phone. On all these occasions, Miguel’s cell phone is located in the BTS zone of Camas, with the exception of the last one – the one at 05:22 – in which he connects with the BTS of Macarena, close to his home in Leon XIII . Carcano ‘s cell phone was inactive between
01:37
and 04:22, although he used several terminals . had no participation in the events, it was corroborated by objective data and testimonial evidence. “Thus, the location of his calls, received and sent, from his cell phone guarantee the place where he was at all times,
according to its monolithic version”.
In this way, Javier Delgado called his girlfriend, Maria Garcia , from Leon XIII’s apartment at 8:30 p.m., 8:34 p.m. and 8:41 p.m. At 9:01 p.m. he called his ex-wife, locating himself in a place near her home, on Tharsis street, and on the 25th at 12:01 a.m. he called from the Dseda bar – which was then on Juan Antonio Cavestany street. – to a number of an unidentified person; At 02:01 Maria Garcia calls him, in a call that is located in Luis Montoto’s BTS, next to the bar. At 04:02 he calls Maria Garcia; at 04:28 and 04:47 she receives a call from the parents of Marta’s friends who were looking for her; Being then already in the apartment of Leon XIII, from which he made three calls to Miguel (04:35; 04:52 and 04:55).
Together with the analysis of the mobiles, the court required the telephone operators to provide the so-called “raw data” of the terminals of the six involved. In addition to Carcano, this information was expressly requested on the telephone numbers of Javier Garcia Marin, el Cuco, the only person under investigation who was sentenced for concealment to three years in prison, as well as Javier Delgado, Maria Garcia, and Samuel Benitez, who was a friend intimate of Carcano. These last three were finally acquitted by the Court of Seville.
