With his legal appeals exhausted, a Spanish national convicted of murder protested his innocence on Wednesday after the Supreme Court upheld his 10-year sentence.
“If I killed him, show me the evidence,” Ricardo Perez Blundell told a reporter after the hearing. “They don’t even know the cause of death.”
Presiding Judge Soeng Panhavuth sided with prior decisions from the Phnom Penh Municipal Court and Court of Appeal, and ruled that the 43-year-old Blundell was guilty of murdering his roommate, a U.K. national, in Phnom Penh in 2013.
“The Supreme Court decided to uphold the verdict from the Appeal Court,” the judge said.
As Mr. Blundell was escorted out of the courtroom after the decision, he continued to protest his innocence.
“There is no justice,” Mr. Blundell said. “If I murdered him, tell me how I murdered him?”
Mr. Blundell was arrested in August of 2013 after the owner of his rented apartment in Daun Penh district’s Phsar Thmei III commune noticed a foul smell coming from his room.
Police officers found the decomposing body of John Connell under a mat and tarpaulin. The body had been left in the room for 26 days, according to previous reports.
Mr. Blundell claimed he had found his friend dead, but was too afraid to report it because he had lost his passport and feared he would be accused of living in the country illegally.
The Phnom Penh Municipal Court sentenced Mr. Blundell to 10 years in Prey Sar prison in December 2014.
