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Stolen Police Arsenal Recovered
The firearms that were stolen
from the Guácimo police station
last week appeared yesterday,
buried in the ground several
metres away from the principal
suspect in the disappearance
that left police officials
bewildered as someone had
completed emptied the stations
arms storage.
Authorities had theorized that
the robbery had been an inside
job and had police officer Díaz,
who was on night watch at the
station the night the guns went
missing. Missing from the
station armory were 15 M-16
rifles, four .45 calible
pistols, a 9mm, a .38 revolver
and some 1,500 rounds of
ammunition.
Yesterday, a large part of the
missing firearms were found when
police in the early morning
hours decided to dig up an area
near Rancho Amubri, a kilometre
from downtown Siquirres on the
road to Turrialba. The dig was
in the location where officer
Días lived with his wife for a
number of years, before
divorcing in December 2003.
Authorities say that Díaz took
advantage of his knowledge of
the area to bury the guns. It
was Díaz himself who led his
companions to the location of
the guns. Missing from the
arsenal are several of the
handguns, one appearing in the
hands of man in Limón.
Fernando Berrocal, Minister of
Seguridad Pública, praised the
work of his officials who closed
off the area with some 22
roadblocks of the principal
routes of the area, effectively
blocking the eventual transfer
of the firearms from the small
town to the Atlantic and San
José area.
"It would have been a tragedy is
the guns had fallen in the hands
of anti-socials", said Berrocal.
Some 250 officers of the
Organismo de Investigación
Judicial (OIJ), Dirección de
Inteligencia y Seguridad
Nacional (DIS), and the Unidad
de Intervención Policial (UIP),
were involved in the search
operation. Berrocal praised the
workd of the Unidad de Zapadores,
who are experts in detecting
metal buried in the ground.
"The presumption is that the
objective of the theft was to
sell the guns on the black
market, however, they could not
get them out the area due to the
roadblocks and police operation"
said Seguridad Vice-Minister
Rafael Ángel Gutiérrez.
According to Minister Berrocal,
new preventive measures are now
in place to avoid this sort of
thing from happening.
As to Díaz, he is not talking.
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