Xabier Markina

Xabier Markina lived a double life: a celebrated physician whose treatments brought him social prestige, and the spiritual leader of a secret group associated with occult practice and the sacrifice of a newborn. His identity links the investigators’ account of ritual killings in Lesaka and Baztán to the respectable medical career he pursued under the name of his clinic—and to the family history of Amaia Salazar’s partner. By the end of the investigation, Markina has been identified and a search order has been issued, but his fate remains unresolved.

Identity and Medical Career

For years, the group’s leader was known to investigators through a different name from the one he had used in his medical profession. A witness identified the leader as Xabier Tabese, estimated that he was about forty-five during the group’s activities, and knew little else about his background. That concealment was not a matter of a wholly invented medical identity: investigators later learned that he had adopted the name of his clinic for professional use, while his actual name was Xabier Markina.

The medical association in Madrid confirmed that there had been a Clínica Tabese in Las Rozas from the 1970s through the mid-1990s. Its proprietor, known professionally as Doctor Tabese, had enjoyed considerable popularity and prestige. His reputation rested in part on novel treatments imported from the United States. The association reported that he had died, though it could not establish exactly when; he had been out of public life for some time, had retired from psychology, and was buried in Hondarribia, where he had lived after leaving practice. The conventional standing of this career makes the concealed role more stark: the same man celebrated for innovative treatment was accused of directing a group that gave occult practices the authority of a spiritual guide.

The Group and Its Teachings

The witness described Markina as the group’s leader and source of its knowledge. Members adored him, welcomed his unpredictable visits as occasions for celebration, and spent his absences waiting for him to return. He told them what to do and how to do it, presenting the practice as a recovery of ancient witchcraft, traditional origins, and a relationship with primordial forces through offerings. In the witness’s account, Markina taught that magical beings had long inhabited the region and that the early inhabitants of Baztán had marked their presence through megalithic monuments and ley lines. He invoked the Neolithic dating attributed to the Watkins alignments and said that the beings needed only to be awakened with offerings for the group to obtain what it wanted.

At first, the exchange described by the witness involved small animal sacrifices performed according to prescribed methods. The members believed that these offerings brought real favors and signs of power. The witness recalled the intoxicating sense of having caused an effect and of feeling almost godlike. But the perceived benefits came with increasing demands. He said he lived with the group for nearly a year, gaining access to knowledge, powers, and extraordinary experiences before the practice turned to human sacrifice. His account places Markina not merely at the group’s symbolic center but in the role of instructor: he supplied the framework through which the members understood their actions as a bargain with supernatural forces.

Sacrifice and the Group’s Dissolution

The witness refused to describe the killing directly, but acknowledged that it happened and said all the members participated. In the account he gave, the newborn girl’s own parents offered her and killed her, as the group’s procedure required. Afterward, the body was taken away. Within days, the group began to break apart; in less than a month, nearly all its members had disappeared. Markina never returned, and the witness said that only the couple who had made the offering remained. His account therefore ties the leader’s sudden absence to the aftermath of the killing, while leaving his precise role in the act itself less fully described than his role in teaching and directing the group.

Years later, testimony about the rituals helped investigators connect the group to suspicious deaths and missing children. A witness said that the group’s practices included suffocating children and then taking their bodies to an unknown place to complete the ritual. The reported reward was chiefly economic wealth for the participants, while parents were said to receive whatever they desired. Investigators also learned that Markina had directed a group established in Lesaka and Baztán in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and that its members had sometimes visited a separate group at Argi Beltz. According to the witness, that other group was preparing to carry out a similar sacrifice. These claims formed part of an investigation into a wider network, rather than a complete account of every participant or every death.

Family and Concealment

Markina was the father of Amaia Salazar’s partner. When Amaia warned that opening an official investigation could bring his father’s name into public view, her partner said that Markina had abandoned him after his mother lost her sanity. He had left behind a fund for his son’s upkeep and education, then disappeared from his life. His son had heard his parents argue about Markina’s affairs and imagined that, after leaving, he continued moving between women, travelling, and living as a wealthy man. He had no further contact with his father before being informed of his death; he also recalled that Markina eventually died aboard his yacht.

This family account gives the revelation a personal consequence beyond the investigation. The celebrated doctor and occult leader was not a distant suspect newly attached to the case: he was the absent father whose departure shaped his son’s understanding of their family. The investigator’s discovery also forced Amaia’s partner to confront a history he had believed closed by death. The information available to the police did not erase the earlier account of abandonment; it transformed its meaning by connecting the absent parent to the group under investigation.

Identification and Pursuit

A clue about Markina’s possible connection to medicine proved decisive. An earlier lead suggested that he might have been trained in psychology, psychiatry, or medicine, and the record of the Clínica Tabese provided a match for the name and professional history. Investigators identified Doctor Xabier Markina as the same man whom the witness had placed at the head of the group. A photograph showed an older man who closely resembled his son, making the family connection visible as well as documentary.

The investigation’s case against the group gathered further support from evidence concerning the Martínez Bayón family, whose daughter was said to have died at fourteen months during a supposed trip to the United Kingdom. Amaia reported that investigators could find no death certificate, autopsy report, burial record, or entry for the child in her parents’ passports, despite such entries being customary at the time. She also reported that the father of Doctor Berasategui had confessed that he and his wife had offered their first daughter to the practice, and that the wife’s depression followed. These facts did not by themselves establish Markina’s direct involvement in every suspected death; they placed his leadership within a pattern of allegations that the police were assembling from witnesses and records.

After the investigation reached the final stage described in the book, a search order was issued for Xabier Markina. The narrative had earlier reported that the doctor was dead and buried in Hondarribia, yet the closing order leaves his whereabouts as an active question rather than supplying an arrest or a definitive resolution. His story consequently rests on a deliberate collision of identities and accounts: public prestige against secret leadership, a son’s belief that his father was gone against a renewed police search, and a doctor’s documented professional history against a witness’s testimony about ritual sacrifice.