![]() ![]() If police were involved in these types of crimes, they would be detained. "I have no information indicating the state is acting in this manner. "We've detected a group of people carrying out these types of operations and we're working to resolve them," Mejia said. He also said he knew nothing about Carranza's case, though he noted that Honduras is in the grip of gang warfare, marked by groups of assassins acting on behalf of organized crime. National Police spokesman Hector Ivan Mejia declined to comment on the videotape of the shootings because he said they are under investigation. The other is seen still moving after three shots from an assault weapon. The remaining two, their hands up in surrender, were made to lie face down on the pavement - and then shot several times in cold blood. The modus operandi in death-squad style killings does not vary much: masked men in bulletproof vests, traveling in large vehicles with tinted windows and no plates, roam the city in groups of 10, said an official in the Carranza investigation, who also could not be named because of the sensitivity of the case.Ī month after Carranza's disappearance, Honduran media released a surveillance video of a similar case: five young men walking a street at night were stopped and surrounded by masked gunmen with AK-47s who pulled up in a large SUV. Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world. "You can look for those dogs in the Tablon," Alvarado said they told her, referring to a lot outside of the city where bodies of the executed are regularly dumped, their faces taped and hands and feet tied. At the National Criminal Investigations Office, she was met by 20 officers, some masked, who openly played with their guns as she asked after her son and his girlfriend. Roberta Jacobson, assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, said last week that the department is constantly reviewing information about people and institutions receiving support in Honduras, and so far, the state department can and will continue funding and training the Honduran police.Īfter witnesses told Alvarado, 50, that her son had been taken by police, she went to a series of police stations in search of him. Congress decided to withhold State Department funding to the police while they investigated the 2002 internal affairs report. Last year, Bonilla was chosen to lead the national police force despite unanswered questions about his past. The head of internal affairs unit who produced the report, Maria Luisa Borjas, was expelled from the department, and the rest of the cases, like most crimes in Honduras, were not investigated. In 2002, a police internal affairs report accused then police prison inspector Juan Carlos Bonilla of three extrajudicial killings - and linked him to 11 more deaths and disappearances that it said were part of a police policy of "social cleansing." He was tried and acquitted on one of the three charges. ![]() The country's National Autonomous University, citing police reports, has counted 149 civilians killed by police in the last two years, including 25 members of the 18th street gang.Įven the country's top police chief has been charged with being complicit. In the last three years, the AP has learned, Honduran prosecutors have received as many as 150 formal complaints about death squad-style killings in the capital of Tegucigalpa, and at least 50 more in the economic hub of San Pedro Sula. Soon after, agents at the national criminal investigations office acknowledged that there was a detention order for Carranza, and he had been brought in. ![]() ![]() The photo was distributed to media by a police prosecutor, according to three sources who didn't want to be named for security reasons. Carranza's mother, Blanca Alvarado, recognized him from his tattoos. It also published a photo of a shirtless, tattooed young man lying on the ground, his hands behind his back, his face partially wrapped in blue duct tape, the roll still attached. 10, Honduras' major newspaper, El Heraldo, reported that police had captured Carranza, a leader of the 18th Street gang suspected in the shooting death of a police commander months earlier. Without firing a shot, witnesses said, they took Kevin Samraid Carranza Padilla, 28, known in the gang world as "Teiker," and his girlfriend, Cindy Yadira Garcia, 19. Armed, masked men arrived in late-model SUVs, getting through the gate into the small neighborhood of humble homes. The operation was quick and under the cover of night. ![]()
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