The judicial and social memory of the Canary Islands archipelago vividly retains one of the darkest episodes in its contemporary history, an event that deeply shocked the influential Indian community and the entire business sector of the islands. In the autumn of 2016, the Sixth Section of the Las Palmas Provincial Court sentenced former chef Ashoklal GS to 14 years in prison for homicide with the aggravating circumstance of abuse of power. He was accused of killing the matriarch of the prestigious Fund Grube business group.
Those events, judged and ratified after the unanimous verdict of a jury court presided over by Magistrate Emilio Moya, suddenly shattered the apparent tranquility of the urbanizations in southern Gran Canaria, revealing a web of vulnerability, human anguish and labor relations cut short in the most violent way possible.
The established facts date the tragedy back to the early morning of January 4, 2013, when the defendant knocked on the door of the victim's home in southern Gran Canaria. The assailant knew several members of the family well, having worked as a cook for various relatives for over 15 years.
During the oral trial, the defendant made a Copernican shift in his legal strategy by categorically denying authorship of the homicide and contradicting the theory held by the Prosecutor's Office that the victim was alone and had opened the door for him.
In his statement, the former cook claimed that the victim's husband was also in the house, who had supposedly invited him the day before, opened the door for him and encouraged him to go to the bedroom, stating that "he said she was still sleeping and that I should go to the room to help her."
According to his new exculpatory version, it was at that moment that he contemplated the horrific scene: "I saw blood. I was scared, I was scared and I left," claiming that the self-incriminating statements signed in police custody were due to his lack of knowledge of the language and the absence of an official translator, having agreed to sign the papers under the false promise that "they told me to sign, that they were going to let me go" because "I didn't understand anything" despite being totally innocent, insisting that "I have never hurt anyone in my life."
Since the door showed no signs of forced entry, the jury determined by a vote of seven to two that the 73-year-old woman, who was completely alone in the house, allowed her former employee access. The man begged her to let him eat and sleep there, but the owner flatly refused. In a gesture of charity, she offered him cash assistance to help alleviate his precarious situation.
According to the proven facts of the investigation and the expert report of the Institute of Legal Medicine, the victim went to his bedroom to look for the promised money, sitting on the bed and momentarily putting aside the cane that he usually used to move around the house due to his serious mobility problems.
At that precise moment, according to the judges' testimony, the accused lunged at her, "furious at the woman's refusal" to give him shelter and food. The assailant "grabbed her tightly by the neck and, holding the cane at the bottom, struck her three times on the head with the handle, twice in the parietal region and once in the frontal region," resulting in a fatal outcome.
The court unanimously concluded that, by acting in this manner, the defendant did so "with the undeniable intention of ending her life," a lethal objective he accomplished by causing a traumatic brain injury with intracranial hemorrhage. Likewise, the jury found premeditation and abuse of power, noting that the defendant was fully aware of the elderly woman's limited mobility, a circumstance he "exploited to facilitate the commission of the crime" by preventing any possibility of defense on the part of the septuagenarian. Although the Public Prosecutor maintained his request for a 14-year prison sentence, the subsequent legal proceedings were marked by significant controversy surrounding the defendant's initial self-incriminating statements.
As a supposed indication of his alleged innocence, both the accused and his defense highlighted the unusual fact that several direct relatives of the deceased —including a brother-in-law, his wife and daughter— repeatedly visited him in jail during the more than three years he remained in pretrial detention, giving him cash for his daily expenses.
However, the prosecutor refuted this argument by emphasizing the defendant's profound contradictions and his clear prior disqualification. Ultimately, the strength of the forensic evidence and the court's unanimous rejection of any pardon or suspended sentence sealed the former chef's fate, bringing to a close a tragic chapter in which violence forever shattered the history of the Canary Islands' commercial empire.
