HAVANA – The Catholic archbishop of Havana, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, announced Thursday that Cuban authorities captured the alleged killer of Spanish priest Mariano Arroyo, whose body was found three days ago with his hands tied, stabbed and partially burned.
“The investigation carried out by the police experts has permitted the location and capture of the alleged perpetrator of this abominable crime and his possible accomplices,” said the archdiocese in a communique.
“Besides the associated evidence, the police authorities already have the confession of the mentioned perpetrator,” added the communique, going on to say that the investigation “still has not been concluded.”
It adds that the authorities also confirmed that the investigation continues into the murder of another Spanish priest in February in the Cuban capital, Eduardo de la Fuente, and that in that case “at least one arrested person confessed his guilt and responsibility.”
The announcement rejects “any attempt to link one case with another or to give it a religious or political meaning completely foreign to the reality of the criminal deed itself,” but it did not go into any more detail on that aspect of the case.
This is the first information to be publicly released concerning the investigations into the murders, about which the archdiocese, Cuban authorities and the Spanish Embassy in Havana had maintained complete silence to date.
Cuba’s state-controlled media has not published anything about the two crimes.
Spanish priest Isidro Hoyos, a friend and compatriot of the two murdered priests, told Efe on Tuesday that the crimes had very similar characteristics and do not seem to be a “coincidence,” and he added that he is scared.
“In my country, they say that ‘you don’t have two without three,’ but I don’t want to think about that,” said Hoyos, 75, who came to the communist island a decade ago to minister to the faithful at the San Martin de Porras Church, in the Havana neighborhood of Alamar.
Hoyos traveled to Cuba inspired by Arroyo, his colleague and friend. He was also a friend of Eduardo de la Fuente, 61, the parish priest of the church in Santa Clara, in the Havana neighborhood of Lawton, who was stabbed and strangled in mid-February.
“I’m not superstitious, but yesterday (Monday) was exactly five months after Eduardo’s death, and it seems that the procedure was the same, the torture, the cruelty ... It’s so awful,” he said.
Arroyo’s funeral Mass has been scheduled to take place in the Havana Cathedral on Friday and his body will be sent back to Madrid on a flight that will leave a few hours later. EFE
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