Police in the north of the country have arrested an alleged serial killer who preyed on homeless people he brought to his home where he murdered and dismembered them, officials said Tuesday.
The murders – at least five are known to investigators – always took place on Fridays.
A 37-year-old man later identified as Matías Jurado by local press was arrested after a raid on his home last week yielded human "bones, blood, pieces of skin and even a nose," Attorney General Sergio Lello Sánchez of Jujuy Province said via telephone Tuesday.
The raid was the result of clues gathered from analysing security camera footage.
At the house where they arrested the man, police also encountered a 16-year-old boy who appeared scared and said he was the owner's nephew, said Lello Sánchez.
He told police: "I want to talk," and then recounted that his uncle would go out on Friday afternoons and return at night with different people.
He apparently lured them with offers of a job or a drink.
The boy said his uncle would "beat them, kill them, cut their bodies, burn them, and take them out in garbage bags," case prosecutor Guillermo Beller told the A24 news channel.
The victims were homeless and mostly elderly people, added Lello Sánchez.
The investigation started after evidence emerged that five missing people had last been seen alive in the same place, near an old bus terminal in the city of San Salvador de Jujuy.
Security footage showed two of them getting into taxis with the same person at different times.
A taxi-driver took the police to the house where he had dropped his clients.
The man, who insists he is innocent, was charged Monday with aggravated homicide and placed in pre-trial detention for four months pending the investigation that Lello Sánchez said was at an "early stage."
Investigators were still in the process of analysing the remains and extracting DNA samples from relatives of missing persons to try and identify the dead.
According to Lello Sánchez, the victims “were people who wandered the streets in marginalised situations,” most of them elderly.
Jurado previously served jail-time for theft, according to reports.
Beller told the Noticias Argentinas news agency that the accused had been arrested for mugging and burglary.
The court official stressed that different locals had testified and called Jurado "violent" because he was known for running conflicts in the local neighbourhood of Alto Comedero.
Beller stated that the victims had been identified as Juan Carlos González, aged 60; Juan José Ponce (age 51); Miguel Ángel Quispe (age 60); Sergio Alejandro Sosa (age 25) and Jorge Omar Anachuri (age 60).
"They were homeless people, two of them recorded by a security camera getting into a taxi with Jurado to go to his home and the GPS of a mobile phone also placed another one there," the prosecutor highlighted.
Beller said that there is a link between the cases since all victims were homeless and two of them suffered from some kind of disability.
An essential contribution to the investigation was the deposition by a 16-year-old teenager, the nephew of the accused.
He told the authorities that the man “quartered the people he took home and then got rid of the remains in waste ground or buried them.”
Jurado is currently being held at Gorriti prison in San Salvador de Jujuy.
– TIMES/NA/AFP
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