Attempt to Sacrifice Ibai

The Attempt to Sacrifice Ibai was the intended killing of Amaia Salazar and James’s son by Berasategui and Rosario in a cave. Ibai survived, but the episode left Amaia with direct knowledge of the planned sacrifice and became a crucial link in her investigation of the desecrated graves and the use of children’s remains.

Background and Approach

Amaia recalled that Rosario had left the hospital on foot, come to the family home, and taken Ibai. Rosario then crossed hundreds of meters of mountain terrain from the place where the car had been left to reach the cave. Amaia insisted that Rosario had not seemed like a helpless old woman during this journey, but rather determined and sure of herself; she had been there to see it.

In a later discussion, Amaia showed Sarasola a photograph of the cave interior. She identified it as the place where Berasategui and Rosario had been preparing to kill Ibai. The photograph made the location more than a memory of danger: it offered physical evidence around which Amaia could press for an explanation.

The Intended Sacrifice

The planned killing did not take place, and Ibai survived. Amaia treated both parts of the event—the intention to kill him and the fact that they did not—as questions requiring explanation. The evidence here does not establish why the plan failed; Amaia instead argued that the answer was connected to the profanations and to the reason the Church had become alarmed by what she believed was initially a less alarming desecration.

The attempt gave the cave a specific ritual meaning in Sarasola’s reading of the photograph. He interpreted it as the setting for a human sacrifice intended as an offering to evil, and described the killing of a child as the greatest such offering. His interpretation connected the immediate threat to Ibai with the human remains, particularly those of children, found in the desecrations at Arizkun.

Investigation and Significance

Amaia suspected that the Tarttalo murders were a conspicuous distraction: they drew attention while concealing a more important pattern involving the profanations, the bones of children from her family, and the attempted killing of her son. This remained her investigative theory rather than a fully established explanation, but the cave photograph gave her a concrete basis for asking Sarasola to assess the event and its ritual implications.

Sarasola placed that possibility against the history of witchcraft investigations in the valley. He recalled that Salazar y Frías had investigated alleged magical practices in the seventeenth century and that declarations describing crimes against young children, including the later disappearance of their bodies, had been dismissed as false after the Inquisition’s abuses were acknowledged. His account did not by itself prove continuity between those cases and the attempt on Ibai; it supplied a historical frame in which the cave, the desecrated remains, and the failure to complete the sacrifice could be considered together. The episode therefore stands both as a narrowly averted threat to a child and as the point from which Amaia argues that the visible crimes may be concealing a deeper history.