Authorities in Spain Make Arrests in Fatal Shooting of Politician
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Version 0 of 1. MADRID — A regional politician from Spain’s governing Popular Party was shot dead in the northern city of León on Monday, prompting the country’s main parties to suspend their campaigning ahead of the European parliamentary elections later this month. Isabel Carrasco, the head of the provincial council in León, was shot at least three times as she crossed a bridge in downtown Léon, near her home, according to local news media reports. The police arrested a woman and her mother in the shooting. The woman, identified in the local newspaper, Diario de León, as Montserrat Triana Martínez González, is believed to have recently lost her City Council job. The paper did not identify her mother, although it also reported that her father was a police inspector. No weapon has yet been found. Ms. Carrasco, 59, had been running the provincial council in Léon since 2007. Her shooting in broad daylight was a major shock in a country that has only recently emerged from decades of terrorist bombings and political killings by members of ETA, the Basque separatist group, which declared a cease-fire in 2011. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy canceled his political agenda after hearing the news and said he was dismayed by the killing. “It is a time to be united,” he wrote in a Twitter post. The main opposition Socialist Party also suspended its planned campaign events on Monday, in the run-up to the European elections. Ms. Carrasco was the first woman to preside over the council in León, which is in a region that has long been run by the conservative Popular Party. Last year, Ms. Carrasco joined the swelling ranks of Spanish politicians accused of corruption. She was investigated by a judge on suspicion of embezzlement of public funds in connection with her other activities as a board member of two corporations, a regional savings bank and a property company based in Madrid. The inquiry centered on whether she had been claiming thousands of euros of transportation expenses to attend corporate board meetings while in fact traveling with her official government car, but she denied the claims and was not charged. |