November 6, 2006

The Ecuadorian immigrant to Spain dubbed the "Monster of Machala" was sentenced Monday to 45 years in prison for the rape and murder of a young female student and the attempted rape-murder of a prostitute.

Gilberto Antonio Chamba Jaramillo got 20 years for the murder of law student Maria Isabel Bascunana and 12 additional years for her rape.

The 45-year-old man was also sentenced to 13 years in prison for the attempted murder and rape of a Romanian prostitute.

The crimes were committed in Lerida, a city in the northeastern Spanish region of Catalonia.

Serial rapist to spend 45 years in prison

Typicallyspanish.com

November 6, 2006

Known in Ecuador as the Monster of Machala, he raped and murdered a law student in Lleida in 2004

The man who raped and murdered a young law student in Lleida in 2004 has been sentenced to 45 years in prison.

The body of his victim, 21 year old María Isabel Bascuñana, was found in the boot of her car in the la Bordeta area of Lleida on 24th November 2004, after she was attacked in a car park near the law faculty.

Her murderer was Gilberto Antonio Chamba Jaramillo from Ecuador, who worked as a security guard in the car park.

The ruling at the Lleida provincial court on Monday also sentenced Chamba for the attempted rape and murder of a Rumanian prostitute in the province in 2003.

He has already served time for raping and murdering 8 women in his own country, where he became known as the ‘Monster of Machala'.

Serial killer may have struck again

October 12, 2004

In Ecuador, Gilberto Chamba was known as the Monster of Machala, a serial murderer and rapist who went to jail in 1993 for strangling six young women.

Now police are convinced Chamba has struck again, 5,000 miles away, murdering a university student in the north-western Spanish city of Lerida. A man with the same name who also fits Chamba's description was arrested last week after his fingerprints were found on a cloth used to strangle 21-year-old law student Maria Isabel Bascunana.

The victim had been discovered in the boot of her own car, which also had Chamba's fingerprints on it.

Those fingerprints have been sent to Ecuador to see whether they match those of the man who attacked several young women in the small city of Machala, between 1988 and 1993.

“I don't know how he came to leave the country, whether he did so legally or illegally,'' Oscar Solano, the judge in the Ecuadorian province of El Oro who was in charge of the case there, told the Spanish newspaper El Pais yesterday.

Chamba, 43, reportedly left jail four years ago after receiving a pardon and obtained a passport in his own name which did not include any register of his police record.

The pardon, which came as he was serving a 16-year prison term, was one of 250 handed out that year to mark the Roman Catholic church's jubilee year.

When he applied to emigrate to Spain, no evidence of his police record was found, and he was allowed into the country as a legal immigrant.

The man now believed to have been the Monster of Machala had been living in Spain with a foreign resident's permit and a work permit.

Two months ago he found a job as a watchman at a car park near Lerida's university, where his victim reportedly used to complain to friends about the catcalls he directed at her when she parked there.

Chamba, a former Ecuadorian army soldier and taxi driver who was married and living in Spain with his family, was among those interviewed after the 21-year-old disappeared.

He was eventually arrested on the basis of fingerprint evidence.

A judge has remanded him in custody on suspicion of murder but he has denied killing the student. It was only when an Ecuadorian journalist recognised the photograph and the name of the man detained in Lerida that police realised they might have a serial murderer on their hands.

“There are some faces that can never be forgotten,'' the journalist, Alberto Chavez, told Ecuador's Franja Digital news website.

The Gilberto Chamba arrested in Spain not only shares a name with the Monster of Machala but also reportedly has the same passport number and his mother's name is the same.

“From what I have read in the press, Chamba showed the same passive nature in front of the Spanish police as he showed in front of me,'' said Judge Solano.

“This man is a true psychopath. Only psychopaths are capable of acting like this, denying their guilt after so much damage.''

Chamba, however, publicly confessed his crimes in Ecuador at a press conference in 1993 before he was tried for raping eight women and killing six of them.

“I raped them after they were dead for my personal satisfaction. I am guilty and did all this alone,'' he was reported as saying at the time.

His victims were strangled, with a yellow cord found around their necks, according to press reports in Ecuador.

Spanish police are now trying to trace Chamba's movements around Spain in the four years since he arrived. They are also running through their records looking for any unsolved murders of young women over the same period.