Eleven police officers linked to the investigation by the Prosecutor's Office, testimonies of two patrolmen who say they saw how their superior shot three young people in their custody in cold blood, the escape of that colonel to Mexico and an autopsy that reveals that they received blows before die.
After the tragic history of 6,402 murders of civilians at the hands of the Army, between 2002 and 2008, this is the most recent case of alleged extrajudicial execution that now muddies the Colombian Police.
It happened on July 25 in Chochó, a town in the municipality of Sincelejo, located on the Caribbean coast, and left three young people dead: Jesús David Díaz, 18, Carlos Alberto Ibáñez, 26, and José Carlos Arévalo, of 20. And it would have stayed in the fog if it wasn't for a photo that a neighbor of that town took when the boys were detained at a checkpoint and uploaded it to social networks that same night, when the Police said that they had "been shot down” in combat.
“When they were stopped at a checkpoint and, as they are known in the town, people began to take photos.
At 8:30 pm, when the news of his death spread, an inhabitant posted it on social networks.
I am very grateful because God put his hand in it so that this murder does not go unpunished, ”Yessica Díaz, sister of Jesús, one of the dead youths, told EL PAÍS.
It is one of the proofs that they remained alive when they were in police custody.
From that same night, neighbors and friends of the young people protested demanding justice and that the Prosecutor's Office issue an arrest warrant against Colonel Benjamín Núñez, the main accused.
Almost four weeks later, the autopsy results came out.
In them it was clear, as reported by a source familiar with the case, that the bodies had pre-mortem head trauma, which confirms the testimony of the police officers who saw the triple homicide and who, last week, decided to testify and tell everything.
The magazine
Semana
also published sections of the forensic analysis of the bodies.
"In a single examination, the doctors found six gunshot wounds that led to the conclusion that death was instantaneous," says the portal.
The document, also known to this newspaper, indicates that they also had injuries to other parts of the head and chest, which would imply that they received other blows.
At the time of the triple homicide, the country was experiencing the murder of police officers in a pistol plan by the Clan del Golfo paramilitary gang, which killed at least 36 members of the Police throughout the country.
The same day the youths were arrested, half an hour away, in a town called Sampués, a man entered a bakery and killed patrolman Diego Felipe Ruíz.
The Police designed a "lock plan" to review and arrest possible suspects and that is where a chain of events began that Eduin Piza, the lawyer for two of the murdered youths, calls a mix-up that put "the three boys in the wrong place."
Military criminal justice usually takes on these cases;
but given the evidence, the general directorate of the Prosecutor's Office in Bogotá assumed the investigation and reconstructed the following four moments:
The checkpoint where one of the victims was shot in the knee
After the murder of patrolman Ruíz, the Police made a plan to lock all the entrances and exits of the municipality.
While this was happening, according to Piza, the youngsters Jesús Díaz and José Carlos Arévalo, who used to sprint on motorcycles, practiced
stunts
, as that extreme sport is called that consists of doing pirouettes on a motorcycle.
They are arrested at a first checkpoint and, according to Piza, for not having their mandatory insurance papers (Soat) in order and, due to the illegality of the pitfalls, they tried to flee.
But one of the policemen shot Jesus in the knee.
Wounded, Jesús managed to reach his mother's house in Chochó and one of his sisters decided to take him to a clinic.
They were arrested at a second checkpoint on their way to the hospital
On the way to the hospital, Jesús, José Carlos and Cindy, the sister of the first, were detained in a sector known as the T, or the crossroads of death, due to its high accident rate.
“They shook their hands, they pulled over and stopped.
According to the statements of the patrolmen, they had been told that the alleged murderer of their partner could be injured, so seeing Jesus they decided to reduce and arrest the two boys, "says Senator Alex Flores, who denounced the incident in the Senate. .
That's when Carlos Ibáñez appears, the other victim.
He was a motorcycle taxi driver who, seeing his neighbors, approached to say that he knew them and ended up being arrested.
It is precisely when a neighbor took the photo that shows the three of them alive and that ended up becoming evidence.
“My sister Cindy was a witness and the last person in the family to see him alive.
She told the Prosecutor's Office that they mistreated and insulted them, telling them that they were the murderers of Sampués,” says Yessica.
Cindy is now one of the witnesses in the investigation and has protection.
The 3 defenseless youths before their murder.rrss
Ibáñez was 26 years old and a while before being arrested he had stopped by his mother's house to leave her money for food.
He took a race on his motorcycle and when he returned he stopped to help his friends, his mother Luz María Mercado said, to emphasize that they were not any member of the Clan del Golfo, as the Police wanted to present it.
The woman also said that the same day they raided his house.
“Another son of mine, who came from work, as he saw so many (police) personnel here in the house, he did not know what was happening, he ran and two policemen who were on motorcycles chased him.
One of them shot him, but thank God the bullet didn't do anything to him," the lady said.
Colonel Benjamín Núñez arrives at the checkpoint
The atmosphere was already heated and the police warned by radio that they had two suspects.
Police units from different dependencies began to arrive.
"There are audios that prove that by radio they said kill them, kill them," says Senator Flores.
Colonel Benjamín Núñez, one of the main people involved, arrived in one of those units.
They put the three boys in the back of a van and took them, supposedly to the hospital, but they did so by a longer and more lonely road.
“When we were going to leave, Colonel Núñez got on board,” said one of the policemen who was guarding the boys and confessed to having seen the triple homicide.
The colonel shot them in cold blood, according to patrolmen who witnessed and confessed
In the back of the truck were Colonel Núñez and three patrolmen (two of them have testified).
They guarded the three boys who were lying down, according to his testimony.
Ahead were a female lieutenant and the driver of the vehicle.
“Suddenly, when we were walking down the road, the colonel (pulled out his handgun) and fired the first shot at one of the subjects who was wounded.
We were stunned,” one of the witnesses told authorities.
And he continued the chilling tale of him.
"He took and gave two other shots and also to the other two who were there," added the police officer.
The autopsies of the clinic reveal that they received at least six shots.
Then they took the three dead youths to the María Reina clinic in Sincelejo.
A video from a security camera recorded his arrival and the calm of Colonel Núñez, who ten days later left the country, first for Panama and then for Mexico.
“He has been followed up and registers an entrance to a gym located on Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City,” explains Senator Álex Flores, adding that the patrolmen were intimidated by their superior who called them to his office that night and put on the desk a Mini Uzi pistol.
However, Núñez still does not have an arrest warrant, much less a red circular from Interpol.
Sources from the Prosecutor's Office have said that they were corroborating all the versions, that ballistic tests were carried out and the weapons were requested from all the police officers involved, because they did not find shell casings in the truck.
Also, that the Istanbul protocol was applied to investigate whether there was torture.
The relatives ask that the names of their children be cleared, that it be clarified that they did not belong to the Clan del Golfo and that they had nothing to do with the murder in Sampués.
“We ask that all the videos be taken from the streets of Sampués and from the cameras of commercial establishments so that the honor of the three boys is clarified and cleaned,” concluded the lawyer Eduin Piza.
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