Argentina: Grim News

Here is the latest update on the murder of two French girls in Argentina. Please do not read this if you are sensitive or squeamish. It is reported in Novopress, based on Argentinian sources. It is the raw truth, and therefore seems sensationalized. I can only assume these facts have not been exaggerated:

Even though the examining magistrate managed to get an confession from Gustavo Lasi, the suspect incriminated by DNA traces, the investigators feel that the persons implicated in this affair are not yet all behind bars.

According to the police, the suspects belong to an organized gang that specializes in attacking tourists who are numerous in the region of Salta, one of the main destinations for visitors to Argentina during the Southern winter.

The investigators discovered a great number of complaints filed with the local police by tourists who were victims of armed robbers or purse-snatchers. Most of the complaints had no follow-up because the tourists only wanted a receipt for insurance purposes.

The trick used by the criminals was to limit the use of force and to steal only small objects of value, so that the chances of triggering a police response were nil. The crime that the two young women from Europe were victims of changed the rules and forced the police to deploy all available means to find the guilty parties.

The horror of the attack has aroused intense emotions in a country that is nonetheless used to exceptionally cruel criminal acts. The photos of the corpses taken at the medical-legal institute of Salta had a profound effect on the local journalists who reconstructed the events from information gleaned at the door of the judge's chambers and in the corridors frequented by the investigating police.

Having returned from a hunting and fishing expedition, the suspects noticed the young women and decided to attack them on the tour route. But the young women resisted, taking the criminals by surprise, and a sexual aggression was transformed into a carnage.

Heavily drunk from their hunting and fishing expedition, the suspects brutalized the French girls in a horrific crescendo of violence. They beat them many times over, covering their bodies with hematomas.

In a sadistic game, they allowed them to flee through the thorny bushes and even to climb up steep hills, for their knowledge of the terrain and their physical strength left the girls with no chance at all. The nails of one of the victims, Houria, were almost turned inside out from her attempt to flee.

But they didn't stop there. Once they had them on the ground, the assailants broke their legs by kicking them, one of the fractures was open, an irrefutable testimony to the violence of the blows and the desire to make the victims suffer.

Worn out by this cruel game, the torturers finally finished off the girls with weapons used during their hunt.

Argentinian journalists, never stingy with morbid details, added in their articles that the employees at the funeral home who prepared the bodies for their return to France were horrified by the extent of vaginal and anal injuries on the bodies.

Pushing the envelope quite far, El Tribuno, one of the local papers wrote:

"The Muslim woman in charge of washing three times the body of her fellow Muslim stopped her work regularly because of uncontrollable vomiting, crying in desperation."

Note: One of the girls, Houria, was Muslim.

Cold comfort for the families that it was a French-inspired penal procedure that allowed the guilty to be arrested, and a more South American-style management of the secrets resulting from the investigation that allowed the journalists to follow, practically first hand, the progress of the investigation.

Note: I do not entirely understand the last sentence. Details about the two procedures mentioned were not provided. However, it implies that the guilty would not have been arrested without French intervention, and that journalists in Argentina have greater access than we do to the secrets of police investigations.

My previous update contained a comment from a reader who knows the province of Salta. He briefly discusses the possible political implications of this crime.