Bogus Shaolin monk gets 38 years for slaying two women in Bilbao

Juan Carlos Aguilar, the bogus kung fu master who killed two women in Bilbao in 2013, has received a 38-year prison sentence for his crimes.

The ruling accepts the guilty verdict returned last week by a jury, and hands down 19 years for each of the murders.

Yenny Sofía Rebollo, a 40-year-old from Colombia, was killed on May 25, 2013, while Maureen Ada Otuya, a 29-year-old Nigerian, died of her wounds on June 2 of the same year.

The Shaolin Temple Spain confirmed that Aguilar is neither a Shaolin master nor a monk

As Aguilar had already agreed to plead guilty, the five-day trial focused on whether unnecessary cruelty should be tacked on as an aggravating factor in the killings. Ultimately, it was not.

The trial attracted huge media attention, although the defendant sat absentmindedly throughout. The longest sentence he delivered was a laconic: “I confess to everything.”

The convicted murderer picked up his victims off a street where they were working as prostitutes, and took them to the gym that he ran in downtown Bilbao.

The Basque regional police detained him on June 2 at his gym, Zen 4, after an officer found the Nigerian woman brutally beaten and tied up in the back of the establishment. She died three days later in hospital.

Following his arrest, Aguilar also confessed to murdering Colombian native Rebollo and chopping up her body. Police later found her remains in the gym.

Aguilar became famous in the late 1990s after allegedly qualifying as a Shaolin master and was interviewed extensively by newspapers, television and radio. He appeared in internet clips performing kung fu moves in the orange robes of a Shaolin monk.

But the Shaolin Temple Spain, the only center in the country recognized by the Shaolin Temple in China, later confirmed that Aguilar is neither a Shaolin master nor a monk.