Amaia Salazar’s suspicion that her twin sister was killed in a ritual emerges when a protected witness’s account of a missing girl converges with the empty grave and other buried clues from Amaia’s own past. The link is compelling but not conclusive: the witness identifies a closely similar case at a Baztán caserío, and later explains the cult’s rules for sacrifice, yet the sister’s precise fate remains unverified.

Discovery of a parallel case

While listening to Sarasola explain a separate homicide investigation, Amaia is struck by the images that gather in her mind: a child crossing the meadow between Argi Beltz and Lau Haizeta, her mother leaving before dawn for meetings, her grandmother Juanita crying as she sang, forged death certificates associated with Nurse Hidalgo, and her sister’s empty grave. The montage also brings back Elena Ochoa’s bloodied body and the walnut shells found beside it. These recollections do not independently establish what happened to the sister; together, they make the witness’s account feel like part of the same concealed history.

The protected witness says that the girl in the case he knows was taken away, though he does not know whether her body was buried in the forest or elsewhere. Amaia recognizes a near-identical story from a caserío in Baztán, where the parents had prepared a better alibi and were never investigated. When Sarasola identifies the place as the caserío where Doctor Berasategui conducted grief therapies, Amaia completes the connection: the girl’s death occurred in the year she was born. The parallel turns an old family mystery into a possible homicide, while leaving the identity and fate of the missing child unresolved.

The suspected ritual

A witness later describes the sacrifice as an act directed to Inguma. The victim was to be deprived of air, and afterward her body was to be ceded as an offering. The requirements included being a girl, being under two years old, and being unbaptized. In the witness’s account, baptism itself counted as an offering and commitment to another god, so it disqualified a child from the group’s intended rite.

The age rule was explained through a belief that the soul remained in transition from birth until the second year, making an infant especially suitable as an offering. The witness also said the cult selected victims in groups of the same sex and age, killed in identical circumstances until a cycle was complete. These statements describe the group’s claimed ritual logic, not independent proof that the same procedure was used against Amaia’s sister. They do, however, give specific form to the suspicion raised by the parallel case and the missing body.

Family clues and the limits of proof

Amaia’s recollections place the suspected death amid a wider pattern of concealment: a supposedly empty grave, falsified certificates, clandestine meetings, and the memory of a child’s remains or belongings suggested by a dark, downy patch visible in a backpack. The details recur beside evidence from other investigations, including Elena Ochoa’s death. Their arrangement shows how the separate mysteries begin to illuminate one another, but the narrative does not present every image in Amaia’s mental sequence as direct forensic evidence about her sister.

The distinction matters. The witness cannot say where the girl’s body went, and Amaia’s own comparison establishes a striking resemblance rather than a confirmed identification. What becomes clearer is the possibility that her sister’s death was not the natural loss her family had been led to accept, but one episode in a concealed pattern of ritualized child killing.

Consequences and significance

The revelation changes the meaning of Amaia’s empty-grave discovery: it is no longer only an unexplained absence, but a clue that may connect her family to the same practices exposed by the investigation. It also ties the case’s intimate history to the cult’s larger belief system, in which age, baptism, sex, manner of death, and the disposition of the body all determine whether a child can be offered.

The suspicion remains painful precisely because it does not settle into certainty. When Amaia later weeps in Engrasi’s arms, she mourns what was lost and violated, including bones and blood, before gathering herself for what she must do. The episode thus makes the investigation both evidentiary and personal: the search for the truth about a missing child becomes inseparable from Amaia’s own family history, even while the surviving account cannot finally prove how her sister died.