Guatemalan Congress worker captured for murder of a lawyer

The National Police of Guatemala captured 10 people on Wednesday, including a congressional worker, for their connection to the 2020 murders of a lawyer and a former security chief of the same Parliament in 2020.

The Public Ministry (MP, Prosecutor’s Office) reported on the ten arrests, including that of José Daniel Castillo Quiñónez, who serves as a worker in the Guatemalan Congress according to public information.

Castillo Quiñónez is accused of “the crimes of murder, conspiracy to commit murder and illicit association” in the shooting homicides of the lawyer Jeanpierre Mota Ubico, on June 26, 2020, and of the former head of security of Congress José Guadalupe Hernández, on the day 2 of the same month, according to the MP.

The authorities detailed that the arrests were recorded “in pursuit of the investigation” into the murders of Mota Ubico, shot in his vehicle on a highway in southern Guatemala, and Hernández, also attacked with bullets in the center of the capital, a less than a kilometer from Parliament.

The Public Ministry carried out 21 raids this Wednesday in which “five firearms, eight cell phones, a notebook and various documents were seized.”

According to the Office of the Prosecutor for Crimes against Life, in charge of the investigations in both cases, the “evidence” seized “will serve to strengthen the investigation against the detainees.”

The other nine captured were identified as Adby Can Fernández, Brandon López Zenteno, Ábner Sánchez Villalta, Miguel Corado García, Cristian Ramírez Cardona, Marco Pedro Raxón, Kestler Beltrán Gálvez, Jerson Yovany Barreno and Sabdiel Balán Agareno.

Most are accused of the crimes of murder, conspiracy to commit murder and illicit association, the Public Ministry said.

The authorities classified the detainees as members of “a criminal structure dedicated to the hired assassin.”

According to public information, Castillo Quiñónez was serving as an “operational technician” for Congress.

The motives for the murders of Mota Ubico and Hernández have not been disclosed.

Guatemala is one of the 15 most violent countries in the world according to international organization indexes and in the last decade alone it accounted for 60,000 murders, most of them perpetrated with firearms.