LONDON: A UK judge on Friday jailed for 42 years a man who decapitated and dismembered two people before dumping their bodies in suitcases on a landmark UK bridge.
Colombian national Yostin Mosquera murdered Albert Alfonso, 62, who was originally from France, and Paul Longworth, 71, last year at a flat the couple shared in west London where he had been staying with them.
A court earlier this year found the 35-year-old guilty of murdering both men.
Sentencing him to life with a minimum term of 42 years, Judge Joel Bennathan said the murders had been “premeditated and thoroughly wicked.”
“It was their tragedy that you, Yostin Mosquera, came into their lives,” he said, adding he was “sure” Mosquera had intended to try to sell their flat after killing them.
Mosquera filmed himself having sex with Alfonso and stabbing him to death after killing Longworth, who was struck with a hammer on the back of the head, prosecutors told the court earlier.
Police found the couple’s severed heads in a freezer at the flat, while Mosquera took their bodies to the southwestern city of Bristol in two suitcases where he left them on the Clifton Suspension Bridge.
An analysis of Mosquera’s computer showed he had looked up the value of the couple’s west London home, copied documents containing Alfonso’s online banking details, and searched the web for “serial killers of London” and “Jack the Ripper film.”
Alfonso, a swimming instructor, and Longworth, a retired maintenance worker, became civil partners in 2023.
Judge Bennathan described Alfonso as “a hardworking man who had shown (Mosquera) kindness and generosity.”
Longworth was a “harmless, amiable person who had done (the defendant) no wrong,” he added during a sentencing hearing at London’s Woolwich Crown Court.
After the killing, Mosquera traveled to Bristol where a cyclist spotted him on the bridge with a large red suitcase and a silver trunk.
Questioned by bridge staff about something leaking from the red suitcase, Mosquera told them it was oil.
When they shone their torches on the suitcases, he fled.
Bennathan said he was sure the defendant’s aim had been to “throw the cases full of body parts off the bridge in an attempt to dispose of them.”
Mosquera received two life terms which will be served concurrently along with a 16-month sentence for possessing child pornography.
Killer who dumped bodies in suitcases jailed for 42 years
https://arab.news/vgznc
Killer who dumped bodies in suitcases jailed for 42 years
- Sentencing him to life with a minimum term of 42 years, Judge Joel Bennathan said the murders had been “premeditated and thoroughly wicked“
- Mosquera took their bodies to the southwestern city of Bristol in two suitcases
Australia bans a citizen with alleged links to militant Daesh group from returning from Syria
- The woman was planning to join another 33 Australians and fly on Monday from Damascus to Australia, Burke said
- “These are horrific situations that have been brought on those children by actions of their parents”
MELBOURNE: Australia’s government banned an Australian citizen with alleged ties to the militant Daesh group from returning home from a detention camp in Syria, the latest development in the case of fraught repatriation of families of Daesh fighters.
The woman was planning to join another 33 Australians — 10 women and 23 children — and fly on Monday from Damascus, Syria, to Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Wednesday.
But the group was turned back by Syrian authorities to the Roj detention camp, due to unspecified procedural problems.
The Australian government had acted on news that the group planned to leave Syria, Burke said. He said the woman, whom he did not identify, had been issued with a temporary exclusion order on Monday and her lawyers had been provided with the paperwork on Wednesday.
She was an immigrant who left Australia for Syria sometime between 2013 and 2015, Burke said, declining to elaborate on whether she had children — though he generally blamed the parents for the predicaments of their offspring stranded in Syria.
“These are horrific situations that have been brought on those children by actions of their parents. They are terrible situations. But they have been brought on entirely by horrific decisions that their parents made,” Burke told Australian Broadcasting Corp.
Burke has the power to use temporary exclusion orders to prevent high-risk citizens from returning to Australia for up to two years.
The laws were were introduced to in 2019 to prevent defeated Daesh fighters from returning to Australia. There are no public reports of an order being issued before.
Burke said security agencies had not advised that any of the other Australians in the group warranted an exclusion order. Such orders can’t be made against children younger than 14.
Confusing messages at a cramped camp
At the Roj camp, tucked in Syria’s northeastern corner near the border with Iraq, the Australian women who had expected to travel home refused to speak to The Associated Press on Wednesday.
One of the women, Zeinab Ahmad, said they had been advised by an attorney not to talk to journalists.
A security official at the camp, Chavrê Rojava, said that family members of the detainees — who she said were Australians of Lebanese origin — had traveled to Syria to arrange their return. They brought temporary passports that had been issued for the would-be returnees, Rojava said.
“We have no contact with the Australian government regarding this matter, as we are not part of the process,” she said. “We have left it to the families to resolve.”
Rojava said that after the group had departed the camp to travel to Damascus, they were contacted by a Syrian government official and warned to turn back. The families were “very disappointed” upon returning to the camp, she said.
“We recently requested that all countries and families come and take back their citizens,” Rojava said.
She added that Syrian authorities do not want to see a “repeat of what happened in Al-Hol camp” — a much larger camp, also in northeastern Syria that once housed tens of thousands of people, mostly women and children, with alleged ties to Daesh.
Last month, during fighting between Syrian government forces and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which had controlled Al-Hol, guards abandoned their posts and many of the camp’s residents fled.
That raised concerns that Daesh members would regroup and stage new attacks in Syria.
The Syrian government then established control of Al-Hol and has begun moving its remaining residents to another camp in Aleppo province. The Kurdish-led force remains in control of Roj camp and a ceasefire is now in place.
The thorny issue of repatriating Daesh-linked foreign citizens
Former Daesh fighters from multiple countries, their wives and children have been detained in camps since the militant group lost control of its territory in Syria in 2019. Though defeated, the group still has sleeper cells that carry out deadly attacks in both Syria and Iraq.
Australian governments have repatriated Australian women and children from Syrian detention camps on two occasions. Other Australians have also returned without government assistance.
Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Wednesday reiterated his position announced a day earlier that his government would not help repatriate the latest group.
“These are people who chose to go overseas to align themselves with an ideology which is the caliphate, which is a brutal, reactionary ideology and that seeks to undermine and destroy our way of life,” Albanese told reporters.
He was referring to the militants’ capture of wide swaths of land more than a decade ago that stretched across Syria and Iraq, territory where Daesh established its so-called caliphate. Militant from foreign countries traveled to Syria at the time to join the Daesh. Over the years, they had families and raised children there.
“We are doing nothing to repatriate or to assist these people. I think it’s unfortunate that children are caught up in this, that’s not their decision, but it’s the decision of their parents or their mother,” Albanese added.
