The defender of Human Rights, Walter Márquez, denounced that following the death of Edwin Santos, a social leader in the town of El Nula in Apure State, officers of the Criminal and Criminal Investigation Corps (Cicpc), began an investigation on him for “hate crime” parallel to the main investigation.
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“This situation is very serious because it contaminates the criminal investigation process, since many referential or direct witnesses who could come to contribute to clarifying the facts, will feel intimidated,” emphasized Márquez.
“I myself was summoned for incitement to hatred, to the municipal offices of the Cicpc and I refused to testify, because it would validate this maneuver of the Government to intimidate those who have said the opposite,” he explained.
In his opinion, these actions seek to hinder the investigation in the case of Santos’ death, since he asserted that he, along with César Pérez Vivas, raised two hypotheses that had already been presented publicly. “One, that a motorcycle accident occurred there, and another, that it was a kidnapping and a political crime,” he added.
Likewise, he asserted that “an in-depth investigation must be carried out and not a parallel investigation opened, which is what is happening. The investigation into the death of Edwin Santos is in the Second Prosecutor’s Office of San Cristóbal, and the investigation for incitement to hatred is in the First Prosecutor’s Office of the Public Ministry, and this parallelism causes harm to the investigation.”
He reiterated that, together with Pérez Vivas, they requested that the Minnesota Protocol, a United Nations standard, be applied to clarify what happened to Edwin Santos.
He also rejected the attempt to criminalize those who have requested to investigate and delve deeper into the events surrounding the death of the former leader of the Voluntad Popular party in Apure State.
He also mentioned that he refused to testify before the Cicpc, but he did state that, if necessary, he would go to the Prosecutor’s Office again to contribute with information in order to clarify the event.
“I have unconfirmed information that they are going to call the priest of El Nula and they are going to continue calling people, but it does not contribute in any way to clarifying the truth, rather we could be in the presence of police terrorism that contaminates the investigation,” insisted the human rights defender.