Lesaka

Lesaka is the setting of a secretive group whose reported sacrifice of a newborn turns an apparently alternative spiritual community into one of the novel’s most consequential criminal revelations. The group’s leader moved between Lesaka and Baztán, linking two circles that investigators would later examine together; the testimony about Lesaka also gives the investigation a concrete account of the beliefs and ritual rules surrounding the killing of children. Its importance lies not simply in the crime alleged there, but in the way the case emerges through protected testimony, sealed proceedings, and connections that reach into the present investigation.

Setting and emergence

The account of the Lesaka group reaches Amaia Salazar through Sarasola, who places the case within a longer history of religious and occult activity in Navarra. He describes a region associated both with saints and the Church and with persistent stories of evil, witchcraft, and human sacrifice. His point is that the reported practices cannot be dismissed as a remote survival of old legends: a man had recently gone to a police station in Madrid with a lawyer to confess to a crime that, he said, had occurred decades earlier in Navarra.

The confession concerned a sizeable group established in a farmhouse in Lesaka in 1979. It was not described as a conventional religious institution. A witness recalled arriving in the area at age twenty-five, after university, during San Fermín. A young woman invited him to stay at the house she shared with friends. At first, the group appeared to be a commune interested in tradition, human nature, and the forces of the natural world. Its members grew marijuana, listened to the wind, danced around a fire, and held discussions for potential recruits, including local people and tourists drawn by spirituality, witchcraft, magic, or spiritualism.

The welcoming, exploratory surface concealed a hierarchy. Members spoke repeatedly of a man called Tabese, although the witness did not meet him during his initial summer there. Most of the visitors left when summer ended; the witness was invited to remain. The group’s character changed for him after he met the man in September. In his recollection, Tabese’s money, appearance, manners, and sexual magnetism made him compelling to the members. The witness remembered an atmosphere of adoration and obedience: the group believed Tabese could give them power and tell them what to do.

Beliefs, leadership, and ritual

According to the witness, Tabese presented himself as a guide to ancient witchcraft and a return to local traditions. He taught that the region’s prehistoric monuments and ley lines marked the presence of powerful beings that could be awakened through offerings. In the group’s account of its own practices, communication with these forces promised benefits in exchange for sacrifice. The witness described animal offerings, especially lambs and roosters, alongside blood-covered or blood-drinking ceremonies and orgies. As the members believed they received favors, they were asked to give more in return.

The leader did not live in the farmhouse. He visited frequently and, according to later testimony, moved between the Lesaka group and a related circle in Baztán. Investigators came to identify him as Xabier Markina, also known as Tabese. His position was therefore both intimate and detached: he directed the group’s practices and shaped its beliefs, yet remained outside the shared household. The structure also helps explain why members could describe him as their spiritual authority without necessarily knowing his ordinary circumstances or identity.

The central crime in the witness’s account was the killing of a newborn girl. He said that the child’s own parents offered her to the group and that the members participated in the sacrifice. He refused to describe the ceremony itself, but explained its rules: the victim had to be a girl, under two years old, and unbaptized. Within the group’s belief system, baptism would constitute an offering and commitment to another god, while a child below two remained in a transitional state and was thought to be especially suitable as a vehicle for communication with spiritual forces. The witness also connected the child’s death to Inguma, whose ritual manner of killing involved depriving the victim of air. These were the group’s stated beliefs, not proof of supernatural power; their practical effect was to give violence a prescribed meaning and a set of conditions.

Confession and the group’s collapse

The witness said the group dispersed within months of the killing. Members scattered across the country, and within less than a month the farmhouse was left only by the couple who had made the offering. Among those implicated were lawyers, doctors, and an educator; many were parents themselves. The breadth of the alleged membership made the case socially explosive, while the child’s death and the possibility of further participants gave the investigation a particular need for protection and discretion.

The confession was made in Madrid, but the alleged crime had taken place in Navarra, and the case was handled by a court in Pamplona. The judge imposed investigative secrecy because the allegations had not yet been proved, because publication could damage those implicated and cause public alarm, and above all, Sarasola explained, for security. The witness lived in hiding under police and ecclesiastical protection. This secrecy also explains why Amaia, despite her familiarity with open homicide cases in the city, had not known of the Lesaka investigation. Its absence from ordinary police awareness was not evidence that the account was unimportant; it reflected the separate reporting route and the court’s decision to restrict access.

The witness’s later decision to confess followed a personal catastrophe. Years after leaving the group, he had become wealthy, married, and had a son. When the boy developed cancer, a former member of the group—now a doctor—suggested that a sacrifice might save him. The father considered the proposal in his desperation, but his son died. A week later, he went to the police. He said that after he confessed, his work, money, marriage, home, and friendships fell away. The testimony thus presents the disclosure not as a clean escape from the past but as an act that brought both accountability and severe personal loss.

Place in the wider investigation

Lesaka becomes a crucial lead when Amaia connects the testimony about its group to the separate circle at Argi Beltz in Baztán. She reports that a protected witness described similar practices in both places and identified a leader who moved between the groups. Another witness supported the account of a child born at Argi Beltz who died in unexplained circumstances; the child’s parents had claimed she died during a trip to Britain, but investigators found no death certificate, autopsy report, or burial record supporting that account. Amaia also learns that her own mother had belonged to the Baztán group. These connections make the Lesaka testimony personal as well as procedural, without making every allegation or every suspected death equivalent in evidentiary status.

The group’s rules also help Amaia interpret the pattern of infant deaths under investigation. She and her colleagues consider the reported age limit, the preference for girls, the requirement that a child be unbaptized, and the ritual use of suffocation alongside the geography of suspected deaths. Mapping cases along the Baztán River produces a line of locations that gives the inquiry a spatial pattern, while the Lesaka testimony supplies a possible ideological framework for some of the violence. The map and the confession illuminate different parts of the problem: one shows where deaths cluster, the other describes what a group claimed those deaths could mean.

Lesaka therefore stands at the intersection of hidden history and active investigation. The farmhouse’s apparent communal life gives way, in the witness’s account, to a system in which a charismatic leader defined sacrifice as a transaction and parents could be made participants in it. The case’s secrecy delays its appearance in Amaia’s investigation, but its disclosures reshape her understanding of the connections among the groups, the missing records, and the infant deaths. The place is significant because what was concealed there becomes legible only when testimony, ritual rules, and the geography of the wider case are brought together.