Three teenagers, two of them aged 13 and 15, were arrested on Saturday in Rosario after a Molotov cocktail was thrown at a bus. The youths, who said they lived in a children's home in the city, had in their possession notes threatening Santa Fe's security minister, Pablo Cococcioni. The justice system is investigating whether they were hired by a drug gang.
The two teenagers, aged 13 and 15, were placed at the disposal of the Juvenile Court, while the other, aged 18, will be subject to an indictment hearing at the Public Prosecutor's Office (MPA).
The incident occurred around 2 a.m. on Saturday at 300 Rondeau Boulevard, in the northern area of Rosario. According to police information, the teenagers signaled to the driver of a bus on line 143 and the driver stopped. At that moment, they threw a glass bottle with fuel at the bus, in a Molotov-type assembly. Fortunately, no one was injured in the attack.
Later, personnel from the Radioelectric Command crossed paths with three young people on Avenida de la Travesía and Genova, a few blocks from the site of the attack on the bus, who upon seeing the patrol car fled. Minutes later they were captured by police personnel in Reconquista and the Dominican Republic.
"Intimidating notes, a plastic bottle with two liters of gasoline and two glass bottles were seized from them," the security force said in a statement. The three were taken to the 10th Precinct.
The teenagers said they live in a center for minors and added that they were contacted by people who proposed to carry out the attack on the bus and leave the intimidating notes, sources in the investigation indicated. In their possession were two notes with threats.
One of them read: "Cococio (sic, after the surname of the Santa Fe Minister of Security) stops tormenting visits to high-profile prisoners," in relation to the prisoners so classified by the Penitentiary Service.
The Prosecutor's Office is investigating the details of the episode, which has recent antecedents.
Threats, intimidation and shootings in Rosario
The police arrested 10 days ago two people on a motorcycle, one of them armed, who were also carrying a note with threats. In that case, they were addressed to the governor of Santa Fe, Maximiliano Pullaro.
For this fact, one of the occupants of the motorcycle, who is of legal age, was charged with preventive detention.
Earlier, in the first days of the new administration, there were three shootings at a school, a hospital in Rosario and the ATM of a local branch of the Macro bank.
In two of these episodes, the attackers also left intimidating notes towards the governor. They were signed on behalf of prisoners in Penitentiary Unit 11, located in the town of Piñero, near Rosario.
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As officially explained, "these are actions that are in addition to the operations carried out on Tuesday in the Piñero prison," which led to the intimidation of Pullaro.
Both the provincial government and prosecutor Franco Carbone, who is investigating these events, agreed in attributing the motivation for the shootings to a "reaction" of the prisoners in the high-profile pavilions due to the toughening of the conditions of detention.
These official measures included the transfer of 86 detainees who were housed in different police stations in Rosario to the premises of the Penitentiary Service.
In the previous hours, in the middle of the night, the authorities had begun movements in the Penitentiary Unit No. 11 of Piñero to carry out the "restitution of the high-profile pavilions for drug bosses and hitmen in the provincial penitentiary units," according to official information from the Government of Santa Fe.
With information from Télam
AGE