What was his role and what did he plan to do?

A new suspect has been arrested as part of the investigation into the triple crime of Lara Gutiérrez (15), Morena Verdi (20) and Brenda del Castillo (20). This is a man who had a meeting with the youngest of the three girls hours before the murders and who investigators believe was involved in organizing the event.

This is the 12th detainee that exists in the file and the first since the investigation was led by the Federal Judge of Morón, with interventions by the prosecutor Mariela Labozzetta and the secretaries Solorza and Siciliano, as well as the judge Jorge Rodríguez and the secretary Ignacio Calvi of Secretariat No. 8.

The suspect, whose name was not released because the case was confidential, was arrested on Friday evening at his home in Berazategui, south of the suburbs, by investigators from the DDI of La Matanza, a force that had been working on the investigation from the start.

Investigative sources confided in Clarín that the new inmate played a prominent role in organizing the triple crime, since he was one of the participants in a meeting that took place on Thursday, September 18, a day before the event, where everything would have been planned, and it is believed that he contacted Lara to attend a party under the pretext of visiting Florencio Varela’s house, where they would pay each of the girls $300.

“He was arrested near his home. He was working on tasks to figure out where he was going. He had sold his car and was about to move,” an investigator told this medium.

The suspect will be held incommunicado until Monday and will then be investigated by the judicial authorities.

Until this Friday, 11 defendants have been charged with the crime of Lara, Morena and Brenda: Víctor Sotacuro Lázaro (41), Matías Agustín Ozorio (28), Magalí Celeste González Guerrero (28), Miguel Ángel Villanueva Silva (25), Iván Jeremías Giménez (28), Milagros Florencia Ibáñez (20), Daniela Iara Ibarra (19), Maximiliano Andrés Parra (18), Tony Janzen “Little J” Valverde Victoriano (20), Joseph Freyser Cubas Zavaleta (31) and Mónica Débora Mujica (37).

All men are charged as contributors to the crimes of “illegal deprivation of liberty, aggravated by the plurality of those involved, and because they are one of the minor victims in real competition with murder, aggravated by the premeditated murder of two or more people, for treason and cruelty and for violence by a man towards a woman, as well as for criminal cause”.

Prosecutor Adrián Arribas, head of the La Matanza homicide squad, accused the women of the same crimes, apart from the femicide of the three girls. And for Parra and Ibarra he also ordered a second qualification for aggravated concealment.

The last thing Lara, Brenda and Morena’s families knew was that they would be attending a party on Friday, September 19th where they would be paid $300 each. It was later learned that they were picked up in a van in La Matanza and taken to Florencio Varela.

On Wednesday the 24th, the bodies of the three girls were found in a well dug in the courtyard of a house in Florencio Varela. Autopsies revealed that the victims were tortured, beaten and killed.

On the same day, Parra and Ibarra, who had purchased cleaning products to remove the blood stains in the house, were arrested.

González Guerrero and his partner, Peruvian Villanueva Silva, were later arrested. The woman had rented the property for an alleged “party.”

Two days later, Sotacuro Lázaro fell in the town of Villazón, Bolivia, on the border with La Quiaca, Jujuy. The arrest took place in a hostel about 600 meters from the international border crossing.

A few hours later, his niece Ibáñez was arrested after an interview on a television station.

Then it was the turn of Giménez, who was linked to the triple crime based on the testimony of a law enforcement driver who said he transported a man with a shovel and a loudspeaker from the house where the girls were killed to the suspect’s house.

Finally, on Tuesday, September 30, they caught “Little J” and Ozorio in Peru, who was identified as his right-hand man and was expelled from that country and transferred to Argentina.

According to the testimony of a witness, Mónica Débora Mujica (37), wife of Sotacuro Lázaro and aunt of Ibáñez, was arrested. She claimed she knew the three murders were being committed and that she was connected to drug sales. Based on this description, the woman was arrested on Friday, October 24th.

But Mujica was not the last detainee in this case. The testimony also pointed to another individual named Joseph Freyser Cubas Zavaleta, 31, a Peruvian drug trafficker who was being held in an Argentine federal police mayor’s office.

Known as “El Señor Jota” or “Jota,” he is considered the intellectual originator of the triple crime. He was being held at the PFA mayor’s office at 3500 Cavia Street, awaiting extradition to Peru, where he had an international arrest warrant for a drug trafficking case.

“This is dad,” González Guerrero said in another of his statements. The woman recognized him from a photo shown to her. “Everyone was afraid of him. If someone made a mistake or didn’t do what he wanted, he would send them to torture (he clarifies that the killing did not happen because he served him). Even these tortures were filmed and sent to the rest of the members,” he said.

That is, according to him, Cubas Zavaleta is ranked above Sotacuro Lázaro and Valverde Victoriano in the organization.

The file also contains two identified fugitives against whom there is an international arrest warrant. It is David Gustavo Morales Huamani (36), alias “El Loco David” or “El Tarta”; and Alex Roger Ydone Castillo (50), both of Peruvian nationality.

The first was named by Sotacuro Lázaro as the person who hired him to pick him up from Florencio Varela. The second is the partner of his niece Ibáñez and who, according to the woman, confessed that he had stolen drugs from her and that they would get it back by scaring a man, not by killing the girls.