The Attempted Ritual Sacrifice of Ibai is the point where the investigation’s clues become an immediate threat to Amaia Salazar’s family: Rosario Salazar and Doctor Berasategui brought Ibai to a cave intending to kill him in a human sacrifice. Amaia was present, and Ibai survived. The episode also gives the desecrations at Arizkun a more alarming possible meaning, as Sarasola interprets the cave and the use of children’s bones through the history and ritual logic of witchcraft.

Background and Discovery

Amaia explains the danger to Sarasola by showing him a photograph of the cave interior. She identifies it as the place where Doctor Berasategui and Rosario Salazar had been preparing to kill her son. She suspects the conspicuous Tarttalo murders may have drawn attention away from something more important: the profanations, the use of bones from children in her family, and the reason Ibai had been marked for death. To her, the planned sacrifice and the desecrated remains belong to the same investigation, though the precise connection still needs to be established.

Sarasola reads the photograph as the setting for a human sacrifice, describing the planned killing as both a witchcraft practice and an offering to the Malign. He connects the use of human remains, especially those of children, to the profanations at Arizkun, while distinguishing the use of remains from the killing of a child as an offering. His interpretation places the cave episode within a much older religious history: accounts investigated during the Spanish Inquisition included unresolved crimes against young children and the subsequent disappearance of their bodies, although those reports were later dismissed as false.

The Journey to the Cave

Afterward, James questions whether Rosario could really have managed the journey Amaia describes. He points to her advanced age, the storm, the flooded river, and the large search that followed her disappearance. More than two hundred people looked for her; her coat was found in the river, and the Guardia Civil, Civil Protection, Iriarte, and the judge all accepted that the water had carried her away.

Amaia rejects the idea that Rosario was too frail to act. She insists that Rosario left the hospital on foot, came to the house, took Ibai, and travelled on through the mountain. From where the car was left, Rosario walked hundreds of metres to the cave. Amaia says that she was there and saw Rosario emerge as a determined, assured woman rather than the helpless old woman James imagines. The dispute does not establish where Rosario went afterward, but it leaves her fate unresolved and exposes the gap between the official explanation and Amaia’s direct experience.

The Ritual Logic

Sarasola’s explanation gives the intended killing a ritual framework, while Jonan Etxaide describes the belief that children younger than two occupy a transitional state between worlds and can therefore serve as vehicles for communication with spiritual realms. Sarasola adds that a child’s remains could be valued for ritual use, naming bones, teeth, nails, hair, and the powder made from small bones. He notes that the long bones called mairu-beso had been used in the Arizkun desecration.

A later account of the cult’s rules makes the violence more specific. The child was to be sacrificed to Inguma by deprivation of air, after which the body would be ceded as an offering. The account says that the victim had to be a girl younger than two and unbaptized; baptism would itself constitute an offering and commitment to another god. It also explains the age rule through the belief that the soul remains in transition until the second year. These statements describe the group’s ritual requirements, not independently verified supernatural effects, and they do not establish that every condition applied to Ibai’s attempted sacrifice.

Consequences and Significance

The attempt makes Amaia’s investigation inseparable from her responsibility to protect her child. In a later confrontation, a witness describes the ritual as something parents themselves were required to carry out, and Amaia thinks of Ibai lying on the cave floor. The account’s requirements—age, manner of death, and the child’s status—show how the group turned killing into a system of rules and obligations, while the evidence at Arizkun suggests that children’s remains were also incorporated into its practices.

The episode also changes the meaning of Rosario’s disappearance. James treats the river and the search as persuasive evidence that she drowned; Amaia’s memory of Rosario’s purposeful movement to the cave keeps open the possibility that the accepted account is incomplete. The unresolved question of Rosario’s fate shadows the survival of Ibai: the immediate sacrifice failed, but the danger it revealed reaches beyond one cave, linking the family’s ordeal to the investigation of ritual crimes and missing children’s bodies.

Aftermath

When a bereaved witness later tells Amaia that the opening of a family tomb was stopped and that a child’s body was missing, she explains that a successful inspection might have confirmed the other children were present while leaving the missing girl undiscovered. Her words illuminate the wider stakes of the cave episode: a child’s absence can be dismissed as grief or delusion until physical evidence forces the question into the open.

Amaia’s response remains active rather than consoling. She promises a grieving partner that she will catch the person responsible, even as he tells her that catching the culprit cannot restore the dead. At the end of the investigation, after learning that the dangerous group has been stopped, Amaia breaks down in Engrasi’s arms, grieving the deaths, the violated remains, and what has been lost. The attempted sacrifice is thus not only a rescue from immediate danger; it is part of the violence that leaves Amaia exhausted and bereaved even after the threat has been confronted.