SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (AP) - A judge has sentenced a Catholic deacon to 20 years in prison for planning the murder of a married couple who had threatened to expose his alleged homosexual relationships.

In a decision released late Sunday, Third Penal Court judge Julio Cesar Lara convicted deacon Meregildo Diaz, 46, of paying Army Sgt Valentin Vicioso 125,000 Dominican pesos (US$4,310) to kill Joel Alexander Diaz and Yaniris Ruiz, both 21.
The judge also convicted Vicioso, 38, of murder and sentenced him to 30 years in prison. Both men claimed they were innocent.

The couple disappeared on February 5 from Santo Domingo, where Joel Alexander Diaz had previously attended a public high school where the deacon had been director.

Their bodies, shot multiple times and burned, were found a month later in large metal vats in Azua, about 121 kilometres west of Santo Domingo.

District Attorney Acosta Suriel had argued that Diaz ordered the killings because the couple threatened to expose his alleged homosexual relationships if he didn't pay them off. The prosecution also claimed some of those relationships were with young boys.

Diaz was suspended from his post at the school last year after a few male students accused him of molesting them, though Diaz has never been charged in the alleged incidents.

The judge cited material evidence as proof of Diaz's guilt in the case, including money transfers from him to Vicioso, phone records of conversations between the two men before and after the killings and the metal vats, which Diaz's sister had given him some months earlier.

"The material proof was irrefutable," Lara said in his ruling.
Both men were ordered to pay the victims' families 10 million pesos (US$350,000).

A lawyer for the victims' families said they were satisfied with the decision but had hoped Diaz would get a 30-year sentence, the maximum for murder in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean nation.

"This sentence sends a clear message to anyone who might be tempted to act as these men did," said lawyer Pedro Duarte Canaan.

In a statement Monday, lawyers for the two men said they would appeal the decision on the basis of insufficient proof.

Trousers in Denim

Cream of the 'Crop'

Cheeky's World