A 53-year-old human rights activist who denounced alleged threats against his mother has been accused on suspicion of her murder on August 1.
Fernando Albareda, an activist with the H.I.J.O.S. human rights group was arrested on Thursday afternoon and charged with killing his mother Susana Beatriz Montoya, the widow of Fermín Albareda, a former Córdoba police officer and left-wing activist who was disappeared in 1979 during the era of state terrorism introduced by Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship.
The official charge from prosecutor Juan Pablo Klinger is “homicide aggravated by relation.”
In addition, Klinger revealed that police believe alleged threats, which Fernando reported last December and supposedly were linked to human rights, as showing up at his mother’s home were written by him.
Susana’s body was found in the back of her house.
In a press release, the prosecutor highlighted that a series of investigative measures determined that Fernando Albareda was the “perpetrator of the killing.”
“This decision was made on the basis of the addition of conclusive evidentiary elements which helped forensically rebuild the circumstances which lead us to claim that there are sufficient grounds to suspect” his involvement.
He further informed that the handwriting tests carried out on alleged threats left on Montoya’s house “have graphic kyneticisms akin to some of the graphisms of the anonymous notes analysed for the threats reported on December 8, 2023 by the accused, both having similar characteristics to those of Fernando Armando Albareda.”
The autopsy report concluded that in Susana Montoya’s death “head trauma and mechanical asphyxia by strangulation were involved.”. The violence behind the attack was striking., it noted.
The family has gone through much tragedy and grief. Following the torture and disappearance of his father Fermín Albareda, confirmed in one of the trials probing crimes against humanity in Córdoba, Mónica, the eldest daughter, died in the south.
In the edition of the Official Gazette on May 8, the Security minister published the resolution which "granted the promotion by extraordinary merit due to loss of life while in service, to the immediately higher rank of Deputy Chief of the Córdoba Police to Ricardo Fermín Albareda”.
The administrative decision was retroactive to March 7, 2024, and it authorised “the payment of one hundred percent (100 percent) of the death subsidy in favour of Mr Fernando Armando Albareda and the widow, Susana Beatriz Montoya, in the amount of 76,447,970 pesos. Both had taken part in the recognition.
The allowance from the recognition 45 years after the disappearance of Fermín Albareda is one of the aspects now considered as the motive for the murder, even though the money had never been transferred to Fernando and Susana’s accounts.
– TIMES/PERFIL
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