03/28/2021 3:26 PM
Clarín.com
Police
Updated 03/28/2021 3:26 PM
The story was intended to be a feat and "easy money", but ended in betrayal and clumsiness.
There were three who planned a kidnapping, including the victim's boyfriend.
The delivery went wrong: they were all arrested and will face penalties ranging from 10 to 25 years.
It all started on February 19, around 3.30 pm, when a 20-year-old girl left for lunch with her boyfriend, at the Las Palmas del Pilar shopping mall.
Nothing of a special date or that would attract attention, fast food and back to the country where the young woman lives with her father.
The relationship was just over a year old.
The trust and bond between them had not changed, at least in appearance.
The investigators did not detect debts, pressures or threats, it
was only a poorly executed plan
.
The 23-year-old boyfriend asked for an Uber that afternoon.
Nothing that particularly caught your partner's attention.
A blue EcoSport van came and picked them up at the mall.
On Route 8, at any corner, an armed man got on and threatened them.
Until then, the couple was the victim of an express kidnapping.
Sources of the case confirmed to
Clarín
that one of the captors made at least six extortion calls from the young woman's cell phone: they communicated with her father, a former merchant marine and with an important position in an oil company.
They demanded $ 100,000.
“
$ 100,000 at this time!
How do I get them?
"Questioned the extorted man.
The threats were no different from any other: "
You get them or I'll kill her
."
The truck they used to commit the act was in the name of a relative of a kidnapper.
According to the official statistics of the Specialized Prosecutor's Unit for Extortive Kidnappings, in February there was only one kidnapping and they were counted so far this year.
In 2020 there were 48, four more than in 2019 and half than in 2018.
Extortion kidnappings were mutating as the penalties worsened: they are serious, federal crimes and more difficult to carry out due to the proliferation of security cameras and cell phone traces.
For this reason, in most cases, they are gangs specialized in this crime, with experience: they operate fast, in the middle of a criminal raid and with stolen cars with which they support their victims on the move.
None of that happened in this kidnapping of this young woman.
They transferred her to a house where she could only identify a "dirty mattress and a large space".
Her boyfriend was meters away from her, in the same place.
They suspect that he spent more than an hour on a property owned by José C. Paz.
The victim's father, meanwhile, approached to make the complaint after the first extortion call.
He communicated with the Central Operative Division, for which the federal prosecutor on duty for the City of Buenos Aires, Franco Picardi, intervened.
He turned over his girlfriend for an extortionate kidnapping and ended up in prison.
In the raids they seized weapons and cash.
An hour after the kidnapping, the young woman was released without charging a single peso (or dollar).
The suspicion is that "they
were scared
" by the delays in the negotiation and released her in Tortuguitas, along with her partner, who maintained her character until the last.
After his release, for jurisdictional reasons, he declared himself incompetent and the investigation fell to the federal prosecutor of Tres de Febrero, in charge of Paul Starc.
It was they together with the police officers of the Central Operative Division, dependent on the Ministry of National Security, who managed to identify the patent.
"Immediately the security cameras detected the patent and we discovered that it had no request for kidnapping," confirmed the investigators.
That is why they targeted the owners of the vehicle.
The driver - they trusted - was not the owner but he did have a blue card.
In addition, the phone they used to request the ransom was also in the name of one of the men who became kidnappers.
In the raids they seized weapons and cash.
They used telephones in the name of the criminals.
-Did they do what they had planned?
-Yes, but it came out like the ortho.
That was one of the dialogues that ended up confirming the authorship of the event after the phones were tapped.
This is how they arrested the two half-brothers, aged 33 and 31, from the town of Maquinista Savio.
None had a record or had committed prior crimes.
The missing connection was that of the victim's boyfriend, who not only had contradictions in his story, but also could not prove that he used the Uber app, as he had promised.
The records provided by the company did not have any request for the telephone number or the user who had declared.
Thus,
from victim to suspect
.
Immediately, they detected that the former bricklayer who lived in Del Viso and had communications with the main suspects.
They ordered six simultaneous raids that ended with the hijacking of the truck, a pistol with ammunition, cell phones and cash.
The young woman discovered on the day of her arrest that her boyfriend had been the one who had turned her in.
Now, the improvised gang ended up being processed with preventive detention for the crime of "
extortive kidnapping aggravated by the commission of more than three people and robbery aggravated by being in a town and in a gang
."
They took her cell phone and a black jacket from the girl.
That risky idea could now carry a sentence of between 10 and 25 years in prison.
EMJ
