The burial of the murdered policeman Daniel Palma, on April 6 in Santiago de Chile.@Carabdechile (RR SS)
Carabineros de Chile has arrested on Monday two of those suspected of being involved in the cold-blooded murder of agent Daniel Palma, 33, who was shot in the head last Wednesday night in the heart of Santiago.
The police have located Luis Alberto Lugo Machado and Ovimarlixion Josué Garcés Briceño, both of Venezuelan nationality and with police records, in an apartment in the municipality of Quinta Normal, a central area of the capital.
The murder of the police officer, the third in less than a month, shocked Chilean society and the authorities, in the midst of the public security crisis facing the South American country.
The murder hastened a series of measures by the Government of Gabriel Boric to combat crime, such as the intervention of the 30 municipalities with the highest number of homicides, and produced a sequence of political reactions.
President Boric and three of his predecessors participated in the funeral in Palma on Thursday: Sebastián Piñera, from the right, Michelle Bachelet and Ricardo Lagos, both socialists.
It was a strong signal from the State of Chile against crime and in favor of order, the main priority of the citizenry.
"It does not reverse the pain, but the progress is satisfactory," said the Minister of the Interior, Carolina Tohá, on Monday morning, confirming the two arrests.
Lugo was intensely wanted by the police, who released his photograph to find his whereabouts.
The 23-year-old Venezuelan citizen had changed his appearance to hide: according to the images released today by Carabineros, he has orange hair.
According to investigations, he entered Chile irregularly at the end of 2020 and already in March 2021 he was accused, along with two of his compatriots, of threatening a Venezuelan woman in Curicó, some 200 kilometers south of Santiago de Chile, in a case that the Prosecutor's Office filed.
Three months later, in June 2021, he was arrested while traveling from the capital to Concepción, some 500 kilometers south of the capital.
The police found him 600 milligrams of marijuana and a compressed air pistol, loaded and adapted to fire real bullets.
In May 2022, Lugo was sentenced to three years and one day for possession of a prohibited weapon, but he was given the chance to serve the sentence under intensive probation, reports the Ex-ante media outlet.
Despite this, Carabineros found him last August selling drugs in Tomé, a town in Greater Concepción.
Police found 12.64 grams of marijuana and money on him.
For reasons being internally investigated by the Prosecutor's Office, he was not formally notified nor was the court asked to revoke his probation.
Lugo's fingerprints, who had an outstanding arrest warrant, were on a blue Chevrolet Sonic implicated in the carabinero's murder.
Days before, the car had been used to steal a watch from a passerby in Vitacura, a municipality in eastern Santiago de Chile.
The second man arrested this Monday, Garcés, until today did not appear among those wanted for the crime, at least publicly.
The Chilean media have reported that Garcés entered Chile in 2020 through a clandestine passage in the north of the country and in October of that year the authorities had decreed his expulsion, which ultimately did not materialize.
During this time he had changed his identity: if 2020 was called Arlixon, today he was arrested as Ovimarlixion.
Both Lugo and Garcés have the status of defendants, that is, investigated for the crime of Major Petty Officer Palma.
Both will be formalized this Monday afternoon.
"The two people who are detained have participated in these events," said the prosecutor in charge, Felipe Olivarí.
The police are looking for a third man of Venezuelan nationality, Carlos Cortez Flores, who is on the run.
Only his photograph is known of his room.
The Chilean Public Ministry announced that the prosecutors of the Metropolitan Region, that of Santiago de Chile, will request the preventive detention of all foreigners accused of a crime who do not have a National Identity Document (DNI).
According to official figures, there are some 150,000 undocumented immigrants in Chile whose identity the State does not know.