The afternoon of Friday April 4, during which three students from the school Nuts from Bogota gathered to bake cookies in the house of one of them, north of the Colombian capital, ended up becoming a tragedy that struck several families and which, eight months later, took on unexpected dimensions. Two of the minors, aged 13 and 14, died a few hours after consuming raspberries contaminated with thallium, a highly toxic metal, that afternoon. The chocolate-covered fruit arrived as a purported gift to the home, without a return address, of the brother of one of the victims, who was with them and only consumed a minimal quantity. A third of the minors are recovering outside Colombia, given the seriousness of the effects caused by the substance.
The case gained new momentum with the decision of the Attorney General’s Office to issue an arrest warrant and process an Interpol Red Notice against Zulma Guzmán Castro, who was the lover of the economist Juan de Bedout, the father of one of the deceased minors and who was in the apartment where the events occurred. The extramarital relationship was revealed by De Bedout himself during an interview with the prosecution, as part of the judicial investigation. The woman, who denied her participation in the crime, according to a message sent to WhatsApp groups and reported by the media, is accused of having committed the homicide with premeditation. “He is the one who would plan everything. From obtaining the metal to its delivery,” specifies a source from the investigation agency.
The authorities are also studying the hypothesis of a prolonged poisoning attempt, after the detection of thallium in toxicological tests carried out on De Bedout and another of his children, who did not eat raspberries. In the body of the economist’s wife, who died of cancer in 2020, thallium was also allegedly detected years ago.
In the WhatsApp message attributed to Guzmán Castro, she denies having fled Colombia after the deaths of the miners. “Those who know me know that I haven’t fled anywhere. They know that I worked for more than two years in Argentina and that this year I started a master’s degree in journalism. I arrived in Spain a long month ago, with a stopover in Brazil and I went to the United Kingdom for my son. They accuse me, I imagine, because I had a clandestine relationship with the father of one of the girls,” he says. So far it is unclear whether the woman had any contact with the prosecutor’s office.
The key clues
The first hypotheses about the girls’ deaths, the first on Saturday April 5 and the second four days later, pointed to food poisoning. The turning point came when the Bogotá Health Secretariat ruled out any threat to public health. “According to toxicological tests, what happened was not due to food poisoning but rather to an agent which is not subject to the surveillance of the Secretariat,” explained the secretary, Gerson Bermont. The detection of thallium in the bodies of the victims was confirmed by forensic analyzes by the National Institute of Forensic Medicine.
A few days later, Juan De Bedout attended an interview at the prosecutor’s office, during which he revealed details of his personal life that helped advance the investigation. The financier spoke about the relationship he had between 2017 and 2018 with Zulma Guzmán. De Bedout told the agency that at that point, the woman posed as a real estate agent to enter the building where she lived and install a GPS in her vehicle, and that her home surveillance alerted her to the anomaly by detecting it on security cameras.
As part of the investigation into the death of the miners, the prosecution located the owner who delivered the raspberries. He said the order came from the office of a tarot readerwhose ties to the suspect are unknown, in a building in the exclusive 93rd Street neighborhood. Monitoring of calls received by the messenger detected the communication of a number in Argentina which allegedly belonged to Guzmán Castro.
One of the main doubts that remains concerns how the alleged perpetrator accessed thallium, a substance used more than 50 years ago as rat poison and banned in several countries due to its danger to humans. Currently, it is used in specialized high-tech industries. It has no odor, color or taste and can be absorbed through the digestive, respiratory or skin tracts; It is an invisible poison that accumulates in the body and causes organ damage, gastrointestinal problems, nervous disorders such as pain in the extremities or burning sensations on the skin and cardiovascular consequences. The forensic pathologist and former director of forensic medicine, Carlos Valdés, wonders if this metal was used to commit a crime. “The question is where the thallium was obtained from, how they obtained it, what controls are in place for that… The government should be concerned about controlling this type of substance,” he says.
In August, architect Pedro Forero, father of the other murdered minor, posted a message on his social networks on the occasion of what would be his daughter’s 14th birthday: “As a dad, it is incomprehensible to think that someone could have taken that away from him (…) My daughter, you will always be the greatest love that as a dad I could feel (…) I love you. I miss you. I regret not being able to protect you from this damaged world. I am happy, despite the pain, to have you in my life.
Furthermore, the De Bedout family’s lawyers expect a sentence of more than 50 years in prison for the perpetrator of the double homicide and the double attempted homicide. For now, they are waiting to be arrested and charged by the prosecution. “Then the accusation process, the preparatory hearing and the oral trial will continue. The person captured and accused is entitled to all guarantees and the prosecution will have the duty to prove its hypothesis about the case. A judge will determine whether or not there is reason to impose a sentence,” explains criminal lawyer Fabio Humar. The process could take several years to resolve.
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