SPAIN. MPS URGE PHILIPPINES TO SPARE CONVICTED RAPIST ON DEATH ROW

a delegation of legislators from Spain urged Philippines President Gloria Arroyo on to spare the life of Paco Larranaga, scion of a Spanish-Filipino clan sentenced to death for the rape and murder of two young women. The eight parliamentarians from a cross-section of Spain's political parties said they met with Filipino Senate president Franklin Drilon to deliver their request on the sidelines of an international conference on parliamentarians. The Supreme Court last year upheld the death sentence meted by a lower court on Larranaga and six other co-defendants for the kidnapping and murder of sisters Marijoy and Jacqueline Chiong on the central island of Cebu in 1997.
"We are sure that Paco is innocent," Juan Moscoso del Prado Hernandez of Spain's ruling Socialist Party told a news conference.  The group said they submitted to Drilon and Jose de Venecia, the Speaker of the Philippines House of Representatives documents provided by the Larranaga family that they insisted would prove the convict's innocence. In January, lawyers' groups from Barcelona, Madrid, and Spain's Basque region asked the Filipino Supreme Court to allow them to intervene in the Larranaga case. The three groups said they believed Larranaga was a "Spanish citizen with origins in the Basque country and therefore a member of the European Union," whose members had abolished capital punishment.