Hitmen in police clothing massacred the son of former Honduran president Porfirio Lobo (2010-2014), Said Omar Lobo Bonilla, and three other young people this morning outside a nightclub in the country’s capital, Tegucigalpa. Six heavily armed men broke into a pick-up vehicle at two in the morning at the entrance to the Torre Morazán building where the nightclub is located. According to several surveillance cameras, the criminals got out and headed to the parking lot just at the exact moment in which the former president’s son and his companions left the place in another vehicle and were paying for parking. The gunmen simulated a police search and forced the four youths to get out of the vehicle to search them and, later, place them with their backs facing a wall where they were massacred by shooting them in the head. Seconds before, the victims raised their shirts to show them that they were not armed, thinking that it was a police operation by anti-gang agents, since they were dressed in false clothing from the National Anti-Maras and Gang Force.
However, and before the eyes of several young people who were talking nearby, the gunmen fired their weapons and left the four victims lying lifeless and bloodied, identified as Said Omar Lobo Bonilla, 23 years old (son of the former Honduran president). ), Luis Armando Zelaya, 23 (nephew-in-law of the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Honduran Armed Forces Romeo Vásquez Velásquez), Norlan Enrique Rodríguez, 30 (driver) and José Salomón Vásquez Chávez, 27 (nephew of the former nationalist deputy Walter Chavez).
After the murders, the six assassins began to run, given that from inside the parking lot someone began to shoot at them, mortally wounding one of them who was left lying on the ground after receiving a bullet in one of his legs and began to drag himself. At that moment, one of his companions grabbed him and put him in the vehicle where a seventh assassin was waiting to take him to a private hospital where he died. However, to avoid an investigation, the gunmen took the deceased from the health center to an unknown location.
It so happens that, in another vehicle, there was another son of former Honduran president Porfirio Lobo, although he was unharmed, since the assassins did not notice his presence. According to the first investigations, around one hundred shell casings from semi-automatic weapons have been found at the crime scene, which was guarded by police officers minutes after the crimes.
Thus, half an hour after the events, former President Porfirio Lobo, as well as retired General Romeo Vásquez, came to identify the bodies of their children, although the Police did not let them advance so as not to hinder the investigation. “I couldn’t see my son, but they are things that hurt,” said the 74-year-old former Honduran president, who said that his son was talking with some friends and “we don’t know if he was targeted or what.” He also revealed that another of his 19-year-old sons “nothing happened to him because he was driving in another car. The two kids (young people) were walking and what happened happened, it was a group of friends,” he said a few meters from the scene. of the crime. For his part, Vásquez condemned the “reprehensible act” and called for “reviewing the security policy. This has the characteristics of an operation” because the young people “were taken out of the vehicles and killed.”
For her part, the wife of the former president, Rosa Elena Bonilla, has obtained a 24-hour permit to be able to watch, celebrate the funeral and bury her son, because she is confined in the Women’s Center for Social Adaptation, after that she was arrested in 2018 for a corruption case known as ‘The lady’s petty cash’ that investigates the alleged appropriation of $500,000 that corresponded to state funds destined for social works and that she transferred them to personal accounts to buy furniture, jewelry and medicines. The former first lady of Honduras was found guilty in March of this year of the crimes of fraud and misappropriation of public funds after repeating the trial held in 2019 where she was sentenced to 58 years in prison for these events. The former first lady of Honduras, who is waiting to receive a prison sentence that can exceed 16 years, obtained permission from the National Penitentiary Institute as she is not considered a “highly dangerous” criminal.
For his part, another son of former Honduran president Fabio Lobo was also sentenced to 24 years in prison in New York in 2017 for helping to traffic 1.4 tons of cocaine to the United States, acts of which he pleaded guilty in court. where he assured that “I knew that this was illegal”. Meanwhile, the former president himself has had his US visa revoked since 2017 when he was included in the Engel List, which includes Central American officials and politicians involved in acts of corruption. Likewise, Lobo’s life has been shrouded in tragedy, given that in February 2018 he lost another of his children, Cristian Javier Bulnes Galán, who died at the age of 37 due to alcohol poisoning.
For her part, the president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, has shown her solidarity with Porfirio Lobo, “Rosita” and relatives of the young people murdered “vilely” and has condemned the “death squads that have been operating for years with impunity in Honduras.” . In this sense, she has announced on her social networks that “we will not rest until we dismantle them.”
Meanwhile, the Director of the National Police of Honduras, Héctor Gustavo Sánchez, offered a press conference in which he denounced that “there are intentions of collaborators of criminal structures that already have a plan to create chaos, uncertainty and an environment of insecurity,” so that “these groups are interested in destabilizing the current administration and putting the country’s security in an unfavorable situation.” Thus, Sánchez announced that “the first arrests will be made” in the next few hours for the murder of the four young people, taking into account that “we know that it is a criminal structure and we have more evidence since it was a planned action.”
Hours earlier, he had revealed that the Central American country closed 2021 with 42 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants and “we may end up at 36 or around it and it would be a significant advance.” However, according to the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras (Codeh), more than a hundred people have lost their lives in 30 massacres so far this year in Honduras.
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