Justice overturned this Saturday the pre-trial detention he had decreed a week ago for the formercarabinieri accused of firing a gas canister that caused Fabiola Campillai’s total blindness as part of the social protests that began in October 2019.
The Court of Appeals of San Miguel accepted the defense’s appeal on the precautionary measures to be applied to the accused while the investigation is taking place and instead of pre-trial detention ordered the “total house arrest” of the accused for the “crime of serious serious injury”.
The defendant, Patricio Maturana, was arrested in the early morning of August 28 as the alleged perpetrator of the serious injuries caused by the blindness of Fabiola Campillai on November 26, 2019 in Santiago, when the woman received on her face the impact of a tear gas bomb while waiting for the bus.
That same day, the security judge in charge, Claudio Ortega, stated that there was evidence to estimate Maturana’s involvement in the facts and decreed his pre-trial detention, considering that he poses “a danger to the safety of the victim and society” and giving good the thesis of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which pointed to an “intentionality” and an “abuse of his quality of authority” at the time of the events.
However, and the Court of Appeals held on Saturday that “other precautionary measures are sufficient to secure the purposes of the investigation” and left Maturana under house arrest.
Maturana was disassociated on August 14 from Carabineros’ corps, where he held the position of captain, along with another officer following an internal investigation that established that neither of them conducted investigations to verify health status and assist the victim and omitted the relevant legal procedure.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office’s investigation went further and accused Maturana of being “the author of illegitimate constraints resulting from serious serious injury.”
Campillai’s case, along with that of student Gustavo Gatica, who was also blind after being injured during the protests, went around the world and provoked harsh criticism between various international agencies including the UN and Amnesty International itself, who denounced the high number of eye mutilated in the marches.
