In this state of affairs, and beyond being one of the statements of defendant 1, the reconstruction of defendant 1 constitutes almost independent evidence, a kind of internal corroborating evidence, which can have implications for the trust that must be placed in his version of the police (at least in large part), and on the great weight that must be given to his statements from the moment he decides to confess.
The credibility of the description of the manner in which the deceased was assaulted in the statements of defendant 1 also arises mainly from the multitude of details he provided; In contrast to the main theme of his version (according to which he placed most of the responsibility and initiative for the incident on defendant 2), some of the details he gave actually incriminate him himself for the murder of the deceased. Thus, when he described how he beat the deceased (albeit after he claimed that defendant 2 told him to beat him) with his hands and objects he found, with such force that defendant 2 was forced to separate them, after the deceased stopped screaming and it was not clear whether he was breathing; When he described how at some point the deceased began to breathe, and he called out to defendant 2 to hit him again and he made his last cry; Or when he said that after the deceased was put in the car and before he was set on fire, they no longer tried to find out his condition. As will be described below, in his testimony before us, defendant 1 did not give any plausible explanation as to why he incriminated himself in so many details, if it is not a true version.
As stated, Defendant 1 gave a relatively uniform version in all his statements beginning with the fourth interrogation, although after the reconstruction it was evident that he tried to further intensify Defendant 2's dominance in the incident and his fear of it; and the contradictions that were found between his various statements are relatively minor (for example, on the question of which of the defendants told the deceased that they could meet in the forest for future transactions, on the question of whether he told the deceased that the money was in the forest or thought the money was in the possession of defendant 2, or on the question of who lit the paper that they threw into the car). In addition to the aforesaid, he made statements that are not disputed today to be false, such as his claim that the money for the drugs was in the possession of defendant 2 and that he believed that he intended to pay the deceased; his claim that the initiative to burn the car was that of defendant 2, who ordered him to set fire to the vehicle and he complied; Or his claim that Defendant 2 threatened him after the incident and that he was afraid of him (a version that is contradicted not only from his testimony today, but mainly from the telephone conversation that took place between the defendants before they left for the party, in which the friendship, partnership and reciprocity between them stood out, as well as from the videos filmed at the party).