Argentine police have arrested an alleged serial killer who preyed on homeless people he brought to his home where he murdered and dismembered them, officials said Tuesday.
The murders — at least five are known to investigators — always took place on Fridays, authorties said.
A 37-year-old man — who local media say is known as the “machete man” — was arrested after a raid on his home last week yielded human “bones, blood, pieces of skin and even a nose,” Attorney General Sergio Lello Sanchez of the Jujuy province told AFP by telephone Tuesday.
The raid was the result of clues gathered from analyzing security camera footage.
At the house where they arrested the man, police also encountered a 16-year-old boy who appeared scared and said he was the owner’s nephew, said Lello Sanchez.
He told police: “I want to talk,” and then recounted that his uncle would go out on Friday afternoons and return at night with different people.
He apparently lured them with offers of a job or a drink.
The boy said his uncle would “beat them, kill them, cut their bodies, burn them, and take them out in garbage bags,” case prosecutor Guillermo Beller told the A24 news channel.
The victims were homeless and mostly elderly people, added Lello Sanchez.
A24 identified the suspect as Matías Jurado, a local resident who allegedly terrorized the neighborhood by threatening people with machetes, setting fires and carrying bags or wheelbarrows late at night, A24 reported.
Local residents knew him as “the machete man,” the outlet reported, but no one suspected him of murder.
Jurado has a criminal record dating back to when he was just 17 years old and had already been in prison three times, the outlet reported.
The investigation started after evidence emerged that five missing people had last been seen alive in the same place, near an old bus terminal in the city of San Salvador de Jujuy.
Security footage showed two of them getting into taxis with the same person at different times.
A taxi driver took police to the house where he had dropped his clients.
The suspect, who insists he is innocent, was charged Monday with aggravated homicide and placed in pre-trial detention for four months pending the investigation that Lello Sanchez said was at an “early stage.”
Investigators were still in the process of analyzing the remains and extracting DNA samples from relatives of missing persons to try and identify the dead.
Jujuy, also known as San Salvador de Jujuy, is located in the northwest of Argentina, bordering Chile and Bolivia. It had a population of more than 800,000 residents in 2022.
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