Nicaraguan Pastor Sentenced to 30 Years in Prison Over Woman's Fiery Exorcism Death
A 23-year-old pastor and four of his followers were each sentenced on Tuesday to 30 years in prison for the murder of a woman who was thrown naked onto a fire during an exorcism ritual in Nicaragua.
Pastor Juan Rocha and his four followers—his brothers Tomasa Rocha and Pedro Rocha, and Franklin Jarquin and Esneyda Orozco—were earlier convicted of the premeditated killing of 25-year-old mother-of-two Vilma Trujillo in a trial that ended last week, Agence France Presse reported.
"The suffering that Trujillo was subjected to is something no human being should go through," Judge Alfredo Silva Chamorro said, adding that the killing was premeditated and an abuse of the trust Trujillo had placed on the pastor and his followers.
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The five convicts reportedly showed little reaction as the sentences were read out.
Rocha and three of the followers also received six years for the illegal detention of Trujillo. However under Nicaraguan law, the maximum possible accumulated sentence for a convict is 30 years.
The court also ordered the convicts to pay a $522 fine each.
Their lawyers said they would appeal for the shortening of the prison terms. However, they cannot appeal the conviction, which was delivered by a jury, under Nicaraguan law.
As CP previously reported, Rocha claimed that Trujillo threw herself in the fire during an exorcism rite last February.
However, the woman's husband asserted that Rocha and his four followers stripped his wife naked and rolled her over into the flames.
Rocha earlier told the local newspaper La Prensa that "God told her [Trujillo] that He was going to remove that bad spirit from her, and asked us to start a fire because that's where the spirit was going to be expelled."
He insisted that no one touched Trujillo, saying: "We were praying when we looked at her and saw she was on fire."
However, La Prensa said police report on the tragedy had concluded that Rocha had ordered worshipers to gather up firewood and start praying for her before his alleged accomplices threw her onto the flames.
Jarquin, one of the convicts, claimed that Trujillo had been possessed by a "bad spirit" after committing adultery.
"She had her life companion and committed an error with another man and she was claiming to be a Christian and fasting and I'm sure God punished her in that way and she became possessed by the devil," he said, adding, "It was a bad spirit that pushed her and she fell on the fire."
Trujillo's husband, however, denied the statements made by the accused. "I don't think my wife was possessed at all. What they did to her was witchcraft," he said.
