Ex-security wiretap bosses jailed 50 months

Two former directors of Panama’s Security Council, during the presidency of Ricardo    Martinelli, have been found guilty of illegal wiretapping and sentenced to 50 months in jail.

On Friday, January 4, Sixteenth  Criminal judge Enrique Pérez, sentenced Gustavo Pérez De La Ossa (Panama’s former police chief) and Alejandro Garúz Recuero (related by marriage to Martinelli) to 50 months in prison, declaring them the primary accomplices of a crime against freedom, the inviolability of secrecy and the right to privacy.

The accused were disqualified from exercising public functions for the same term, once the main penalty had been served.

Both defendants were sentenced by Judge Perez to 60 months in prison, which was reduced in a for having accepted an abbreviated process,

“Messrs. Gustavo Adolfo Pérez De La Ossa and Alejandro Garúz Recuero provided a cooperation with which the criminal acts, object of the present criminal investigation, could not have been carried out,” the judge argued in his decision.

Perez is currently serving a sentence in El Renacer prison for illegal arms possession.

The criminal case known as “punctures” began with the declaration of a protected whistleblower, in  July 29, 2014, in which he stated that a well-known person informed him that in the National Security Council, in Building 150, upper floor, were carried out through interceptions of telephone communications, emails, among other means of communication, activities that violated constitutional rights, , among them politicians, magistrates and judges, journalists and members of the Government.

Marttinelli, currently  held in El Renacer Prison is facing similar charges for which the prosecutor has requested a 21 year jail term