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The couple and their adopted daughter. Photo: SCMP Pictures

Spanish couple accused of killing 12-year-old adopted Chinese daughter

Grisly accusations have emerged against a lawyer and a journalist suspected of drugging and suffocating their 12-year-old adopted daughter in a mysterious murder case that has shocked Spain.

AFP

Grisly accusations have emerged against a lawyer and a journalist suspected of drugging and suffocating their 12-year-old adopted daughter in a mysterious murder case that has shocked Spain.

Passers-by found the dead body of Asunta Yong Fang Basterra Porto, a schoolgirl who was born in China and adopted as a baby by the suspects, in a wood in northwestern Spain on September 22.

For weeks since, media have run pictures of the girl's adoptive mother, Rosario Porto, weeping and wrapped in a purple shawl as police detained her and searched her home.

A 44-year-old Spanish lawyer, Porto previously served as an honorary consul for France in the Galicia region.

Other shots have shown the other chief suspect in handcuffs, her ex-husband, Alfonso Basterra, a bespectacled 49-year-old journalist who is Asunta's adoptive father.

[The father] administered to the child a toxic dose of a sedative at his home
JOSE ANTONIO VAZQUEZ TAIN, JUDGE

Then there is a photograph that Asunta had apparently posted of herself, smiling and dressed in a vest and shorts, on a playful blog written in English, describing herself as a "ghost hunter".

Her adoptive parents were arrested on September 27. They were indicted for murder on October 18 and remanded in custody. They both denied killing Asunta.

Until this week, the judge in Asunta's home city of Santiago de Compostela who is investigating her death had enforced judicial secrecy on the case. The judge, Jose Antonio Vazquez Tain, caused a sensation this week when he lifted the secrecy order.

He had previously kept sensitive details confidential while he questioned other suspects, but a series of baffling theories had leaked out in the media.

These included a report that semen from a third suspect was found on the victim's shirt, a suspicion that the judge said had now been ruled out.

In another now abandoned line of enquiry, Asunta had been thought to be heir to an inheritance from her grandparents.

In a summary report released on Wednesday, judge Vazquez revealed ugly details of the accusations against the couple. Porto's lawyer, Jose Luis Gutierrez Aranguren, dismissed them as "speculation".

Porto is "considered responsible in collusion with the other suspect of drugging her daughter for three months and of killing her by suffocation on September 21", the judge wrote in a summary judgment.

"It was [Basterra] who administered to the child a toxic dose of Orfidal (a sedative)" at his home on that date, "to deprive her of all will and defence and presumably to ease the action of asphyxiation, in a plan agreed with Rosario," the judge wrote.

He added that Porto had given contradictory accounts under questioning and had accused her former husband of previously "poisoning the child on at least one occasion with white powders".

"None of what has been said about this makes any sense," Basterra was quoted as saying by the , a Galician regional newspaper where he formerly worked.

Some observers say the story does not add up since the killing lacks a clear motive.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Couple accused of killing adopted Chinese girl
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