An Indonesian court has sentenced two men to 18 years in prison for the incident in their hotel room on the tourist island of Lombok (Indonesia) last July.
The session took place this Wednesday in the Mataram court (Lombok), where the trial began on December 17, and the sentence corresponds to the sentence that the prosecutor, Made Saptini, had requested at the beginning of the month.
The judge, Kelik Trimargo, considered in reading the sentence that the crime had been “proven” and that the convicts, present today in the courtroom, They acted “consciously and knowing that their actions violated the law.”
“The court finds the defendants Suhaeli – alias Eli – and Heri Ridwan – alias Geri – guilty of premeditated murder, as indicated by the Prosecutor’s Office in its first charge,” the judge stressed, as witnessed by EFE.
“The court sentences each of them to 18 years in prison,” he added.
The Prosecutor’s Office had them accused of manslaughter, premeditated murder and robbery with violencecrimes that can carry between 15 years in prison and the death penalty, although Indonesia does not usually apply it.
The facts
The condemned are an Indonesian employee and former employee of the hotel Bumi Aditya, where Muñoz was staying in Lombok, and they denied during the trial that they had premeditated the crime.
However, they admitted that they killed the Spanish woman, then 72 years old, after going into “shock” when she He woke up while they entered his room to rob him. in the early morning of July 2, 2025.
Muñoz’s body was found almost two months later, on August 30, on a beach in Lombok half a kilometer from his hotel, in the Senggigi area, after the accused hid the body there for most of the time since his death, according to the police investigation.
The results of the autopsy, carried out on September 4 at the Lombok police hospital, revealed that Muñoz “died from asphyxiation“.
The examination indicated that there were “signs of trauma to Muñoz’s head, neck and chest,” which “strengthened the suspicion that he was a victim of violence,” according to the report released by the Indonesian Police last September, to which EFE had access.
Inconsistencies in some testimonies
Although the Police and the Prosecutor’s Office maintained the accusation against the two convicts, Muñoz’s entourage denounced on several occasions alleged inconsistencies in the testimonies of other hotel employees. Two of them testified at the trial and claimed not to have seen or noticed anything “suspicious” during that time.
The Police of Lombok, an island near the tourist resort Bali, began an investigation into Muñoz’s disappearance on August 13, after the Spanish Embassy in Indonesia requested help following the first alerts about his disappearance in July, coming from Muñoz’s entourage.
Born in Ferrol (A Coruña) and living in Mallorca, Muñoz used to spend long periods in Lombok and considered the Bumi Aditya her “home” on the island, according to her loved ones.
