The dismantling of the Argi Beltz cult network is the culmination of an investigation that links a secretive group in Orabidea to ritualized infant deaths and concealed remains. What began as an inquiry into individual crimes reveals a network whose beliefs gave violence a prescribed age, manner, and purpose.

Background and ritual logic

The group took root in a farmhouse in Orabidea in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Its members initially lived communally and held cultural and spiritual gatherings, but the meetings turned toward occult practice, including animal sacrifices and, eventually, proposals for human sacrifice. Elena Ochoa, who had attended some of the gatherings with Rosario, left when the rites became too brutal; the group remained active for a time. Rosario, Amaia’s mother, had belonged to it, making the old history part of the present investigation rather than a distant local legend.

The cult’s ritual system treated children under two as especially suitable offerings because their souls were believed to be in transition between worlds. A witness explained that the rite required an unbaptized girl younger than two: baptism was understood as a competing offering to another god, while the child’s age marked a spiritually valuable threshold. The group’s rules also prescribed suffocation and the surrender of the body as an offering to Inguma. These were the members’ beliefs, not independently established supernatural facts, but they shaped the acts the investigation uncovered.

From Pattern to Network

The group’s history became actionable when Amaia connected the old gatherings at Orabidea with the gap in the timeline surrounding Rosario’s disappearance. She believed Rosario and Berasategui had taken shelter somewhere between leaving the clinic and the attack in which Ibai was taken, and that the house where Rosario changed clothes might have served as a safe house. Elena Ochoa had identified the group’s former farmhouse; by the time Amaia found it, it had been renovated into a guarded mansion occupied by a wealthy couple who had belonged to the original group. A neighbor identified Berasategui’s car there on more than one occasion, and the couple admitted knowing him, though they refused to explain their relationship and referred Amaia to their lawyers, Lejarreta y Andía.

The couple’s account of their young daughter’s death deepened the suspicion. They said she had died before the age of two during a trip to the United Kingdom, but investigators found no death certificate, hospital record, or evidence that the trip had taken place. At the time, taking a child abroad required documentation, often including a special government permit. The unexplained account mattered because the group’s ritual beliefs assigned particular significance to children younger than two, and because the couple’s claimed loss resembled a wider pattern.

Amaia’s review of sleeping deaths excluded boys and drew attention to her own sister and three other girls. Their deaths had initially been classified as cot deaths after routine examinations, but the parents’ behavior had seemed sufficiently troubling that social services recommended monitoring families with other children. The families shared a connection to the house and group, as well as to a wealthy lawyer couple in Pamplona who had also lost a daughter in the same way. These links did not by themselves establish what had happened to each child, but they turned isolated deaths into a pattern that could be investigated.

The case files and map work supplied another line of inquiry. Jonan’s scenario list included the addresses of babies whose deaths had been investigated and Amaia’s sister, while excluding the children of Yolanda Berrueta. When Amaia plotted the relevant towns and followed the line formed by the locations, she recognized that it traced the Baztán River, from Erratzu through Arraioz, including Elbete and Elizondo and extending to Oieregi. The geographic pattern brought the buried and missing remains, the old group, and the suspected use of Argi Beltz into a single investigative frame.

Discovery and dismantling

Inside the tomb, the scale of the violence became undeniable. Around a central altar stood a heavy, intricately decorated wooden coffin, encircled in an oval by the remains of at least twenty children. Some had been reduced to old bones; near Amaia lay the swollen, badly decomposed body of Esparza’s little girl. Beside it, on an old shawl, was a very white skeleton missing one arm. Amaia dropped her flashlight and sank to her knees, overcome by grief and revulsion. The coffin at the center of the offering, investigators later established, was empty.

After the confrontation, the response spread across the network’s locations and associates. The Policía Foral searched Argi Beltz in Orabidea, where investigators’ first indications suggested Rosario had hidden during her disappearance. The lawyers Lejarreta y Andía were arrested at their office amid protests and threats of lawsuits. Fina Hidalgo was found hanged from a rope on the branch of her walnut tree, while Inma Herranz wept in Pamplona and claimed she had acted under coercion. Forensic specialists in San Sebastián faced weeks of work identifying and dating the girls’ remains gathered around the empty coffin. Authorities also issued a search order for Xabier Markina, identified as Tabese; the raid and arrests exposed the network’s reach, but Rosario’s whereabouts remained unresolved.

Accountability and unresolved aftermath

The arrests and searches did not bring the investigation to a clean personal reckoning. Despite the fact that Amaia and Iriarte had fired on a judge, the Internal Affairs Department’s review was briefer than expected: Iriarte faced somewhat more questioning, while Amaia was left alone after submitting a written report. Her report omitted nothing about the investigation, but deliberately left out her intimate relationship with Xabier Markina. The distinction leaves the network’s exposure alongside a private truth Amaia withheld, separating the official account of the case from the personal entanglement that had shaped it.