Infant-Killing Rituals of a Secret Group in Navarre

The Infant-Killing Rituals of a Secret Group in Navarre are a concealed crime whose discovery links a secretive group in Lesaka to Amaia Salazar’s investigation of a child’s death in the Baztán Valley. The reported killing of a newborn as an offering, and the uncertainty over what happened to the child’s body, make the case both a revelation about the group and a disturbing echo of Amaia’s own family history.

The Report and Its Secrecy

Sarasola tells Amaia that three years earlier a man went to a police station in Madrid with his lawyer, seeking to confess because remorse had become unbearable. He said that in 1979 he had joined a fairly large group living at a farmhouse in Lesaka, Navarra. The group’s leader presented himself as a psychologist or psychiatrist, lived elsewhere, and visited frequently. According to the witness, the members invoked ancestral entities in practices they described as traditional witchcraft. Their ceremonies included animal sacrifices, chiefly lambs and roosters, orgies, and rituals in which participants covered themselves with blood or drank it.

The Child as an Offering

Months after the group had settled in Lesaka, one of its couples had a baby. The witness said that both parents offered their daughter to the group as its supreme sacrifice. She was only a few days old when she was killed in a satanic ritual described as an offering to evil. The witness recounted the manner of her death in detail, but his account did not establish what became of her body: he knew only that she had been taken, and could not say whether she was buried in the forest or elsewhere.

A related account of the group’s ritual rules gives the killing a more specific, though still uncertain, framework. The child was supposed to be a girl, younger than two, and unbaptized. Baptism was treated as an offering and commitment to another god, incompatible with the group’s own rite. The witness could not confirm whether the Lesaka child’s body had been subjected to the further requirements he described; he understood those conditions to be part of the ritual, but did not know what had happened to her after she was taken.

The age limit rested on a belief that a young child’s soul remained in transition. In the group’s account of the rite, children between birth and two years were especially suitable offerings; childhood and the approach to adulthood carried other significance, but the death of a baby was easier to explain away than the death of an adolescent. Jonan had earlier described a comparable belief found across cultures: that children under two moved between worlds and could see and hear in both, making them a proposed vehicle for communication with spiritual realms. These are the group’s ritual claims, not an explanation verified by the investigation.

The killing was presented not as an isolated act but as an obligation governed by repeated rules. The witness said the sacrifices were organized by sex: when Inguma was believed to awaken and claim victims, those victims were to come from the same sex and age group and to die under identical circumstances until a cycle was complete. Tabese had told the group how the rite should be carried out and what benefits it supposedly brought. The account thus joins the infant’s death to a system of instructions and promised rewards, while leaving the child’s ultimate fate unresolved.

Secrecy, Recognition, and the Baztán Parallel

The Lesaka case had remained outside Amaia Salazar’s view not because it was absent from the authorities’ records, but because it was deliberately concealed within legal and investigative safeguards. The complaint had been made in Madrid to a different police force, while the alleged crime had occurred in Navarra and was being handled by a court in Pamplona. The judge ordered investigative secrecy because the allegations were unproven and exceptionally sensitive, and because public disclosure could cause social alarm and harm those implicated. The witness himself lived in hiding under police and ecclesiastical protection. That arrangement explains how Sarasola could know of a homicide Amaia had never encountered in the open cases she knew.

As Sarasola’s account took shape, Amaia’s response became a sudden assembly of images rather than a settled conclusion: a small girl crossing the meadow between Argi Beltz and Lau Haizeta; her mother leaving before dawn for the gatherings; Juanita grieving as she sang; death certificates falsified by Nurse Hidalgo; her sister’s empty grave; and, in the present investigation, Elena Ochoa’s bloodied body and the walnut shells found beside it. The images joined the newly disclosed ritual to evidence and memories she had already carried, forcing her to reconsider them together. The report did not prove what had happened in her own family, but it made an apparently distant case feel frighteningly close.

Amaia then recognized a second, almost identical story: an infant’s death at a farmhouse in the Baztán Valley, where Doctor Berasategui had conducted grief-therapy sessions. In that case, she said, the parents had prepared a better alibi and had never been investigated for the child’s death. When Sarasola placed the event in the year Amaia was born, she completed the connection herself. The Lesaka confession therefore did more than expose a concealed crime; it supplied a parallel against which Amaia could measure the unexamined death in her own past, while leaving the crucial question of the Lesaka child’s fate unanswered.

The disclosed account also returned later as a lens through which Amaia reconsidered the Basajaun murders. Looking again at the case photographs and the victims’ profiles, she recalled the protected witness’s explanation of the child’s transitional age and the group’s ritual logic. The girls’ exposed bodies, the removal of signs of maturity, the sweet substituted in their place, and their upturned hands seemed to her to enact a forced return to childhood and innocence. The later crimes were not thereby identified as the Lesaka group’s work; rather, the remembered account sharpened the ritual pattern Amaia had already been trying to read, linking the language of offering and childhood to a separate series of murders.

The Human Cost of the Ritual Rules

The testimony also describes how the group’s prescribed cycles pressed differently on men and women. Men were generally the most committed participants; some women who took part fell into depression afterward, and the group’s response was to urge them to have another child quickly. Others, the witness said, did not know what their husbands intended to do. The account therefore places the ritual’s orderly language of age groups, sex, and repeated offerings beside its intimate human cost: parents’ grief was treated as something to be managed so that the cycle could continue, not as a reason to refuse it.