Yugoslav faces death sentence for thirteenth time in Spain. Accused of torturing Nationalist prisoners during war. Decorated weird cells which drove inmates to insanity.
Barcelona, June 13 (AP) A Yugoslav architect, 12 times sentenced to death by Spanish Republicans, faced possible execution by strangulation tonight by Nationalists who charged he built and decorated weird cells in which prisoners were tortured to blindness and insanity.
The military prosecutor concluded the trial of Alfonso Laurent Cik, 33, in a crowded court room of the Palace of Justice with a demand for his death by garroting. The court withheld sentence pending approval from Burgos, General Franco’s capital.
The prosecutor declared it had been conclusively proven Cik directed the construction of little [odd?]-shaped concrete cells four feet high and «decorated» them with diagonal yellow lines, red-white-blue-yellow spots and black and white cubes in such a way that the figures changed shape before the stares of prisoners dazed by high-powered rays from multi-colored lamps.
«Never in the history of Spain has there ever been such refined devices of the most horrible tortures,» declared Colonel Jose Ungria, chief of the Nationalist secret services, who estimated that at least 2,000 had been held in such cells in a few months before Barcelona was captured.
The prisoners were stripped of their clothing and flogged, and steel rings were placed in their eyes to keep them open, Nationalist witnesses said.
Others told of raised cement blocks placed in cell floors so the prisoners could not walk about, and of cement chairs and beds built at a slant so the prisoners could not sit or lie down with comfort.
There was one cell built like a drum, it was declared, so that prisoners’ steps echoed as they were forced to walk in circles for hours.
In an impassioned 90-minute plea for his life, Cik declared, «I am innocent. I ask only justice.»
«I had no participation whatsoever in the construction of the torture cells,» he told the tribunal.
The defendant testified that he came to Spain in 1933 [?] from America and sought work as an architect in Barcelona cabarets. He later became a lieutenant in the Spanish Republican army.
While serving as an agent of the counter-espionage service of General Franco, he related, he was arrested by the Republicans in May of 1937, was sent to a concentration camp and sentenced to death.
He escaped, however, and then joined the Syndicalists.
Altogether, Cik testified, he was sentenced to death on 12 occasions under the Republican regime.
The Syndicalists then forced him to paint the fantastic designs upon the walls of the little concrete cells which the prosecution charges caused many Nationalist prisoners, tortured to extract military information, to go blind and insane.
The architect’s attorney asked that the court give him a 30-year sentence on the ground that his client «only aided a rebellion.»
Cik said he was arrested by the Republicans before he could carry out a plan to «blow up» Republican Checa (secret police) headquarters.
He had built a subterranean mine and placed 300 pounds of dynamite in it, intending to ignite the explosive under cover of one of the aerial bombardments of Barcelona, he claimed.