Cult rites and infant sacrifice

Cult rites and infant sacrifice are the organizing beliefs and practices of a secret group whose members turn children’s deaths into offerings. Their doctrine assigns special power to infants under two, prescribes how a victim must be selected and killed, and promises benefits in exchange for lives. The investigation does not establish the group’s supernatural claims as fact; instead, it reveals how ritual rules give a framework to violence, concealment, and bereavement.

Origins and Recruitment

The group took shape in a farmhouse in Orabidea in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Elena Ochoa described its beginnings as communal and countercultural: members gathered for cultural and spiritual meetings, explored occultism, and sacrificed small animals. Talk of human sacrifice became serious enough that she left, though the group continued for a time. The period’s attraction to free love, drugs, and occult ideas helped make such groups appealing to disaffected young people, while charismatic leaders could make their communities seem exciting and alluring.

A witness who joined a related gathering in Lesaka recalled first encountering a communal search for tradition, nature, and spirituality. Visitors were invited to talks, and some were asked to stay after the summer. The group’s inner life then became more visible: members waited for the intermittent arrival of a wealthy, seductive leader whom they called Xabier Markina. He presented himself as a guide to ancient witchcraft and local powers, teaching that people could awaken extraordinary beings through offerings. At first, members sacrificed animals; the witness described feeling powerful when the group believed its actions had won favors. As those favors accumulated, the demands grew. The apparent exchange—offerings in return for benefits—became a means of binding members to the group and escalating its violence.

The Cult’s Ritual Logic

The doctrine gives infants a special status because it treats the period from birth to age two as a transition between worlds. Jonan Etxaide explains that, in many cultures, children of that age are imagined as able to perceive both worlds, making them suitable intermediaries for communication with spirits or for requests made to them. The group’s rationale also draws on ordinary developmental change: before language develops, infants are said to relate to their surroundings differently; after that threshold, they are considered less effective as vessels, though children remain desirable to the group for other purposes.

The rules described by a former member are narrower still. A sacrificial victim had to be a girl under two and unbaptized. Baptism was understood as an offering and commitment to another god, which, in the group’s own logic, disqualified a child from being offered to Inguma. The witness says the child was to be deprived of air, in imitation of Inguma, and that the body then had to be surrendered as an offering. He could not explain the intended end of the rite. He did say that the group organized victims by sex and age, repeating the same circumstances until what it considered a cycle was complete. These are reported beliefs and instructions, not proof that supernatural forces exist or that the rituals had the powers their leaders claimed.

The cult’s handling of bodies gives the doctrine a material form. The discussion of ritual practice describes children’s corpses as especially prized objects, with bloodletting among the common methods and dismemberment used in other cases. Skulls were valued, as were long bones such as the Mairu-beso bones associated with the desecration at Arizkun; teeth, nails, hair, and powder made from small bones could also be used. The body is thus treated not as the remains of a child but as a collection of materials for ritual use, a distinction that makes the group’s violence both practical and symbolic.

Death, Grief, and Replacement

The group’s teaching does not end with the death itself. The former member says some men were more committed to the sacrifices than women, and that women who participated could fall into depression. A renewed pregnancy was presented as the answer: families were told they could replace a dead child by having another soon. The claim that a child could be replaced turns bereavement into another part of the cult’s system, while ignoring the particular bond between parent and child.

The story repeatedly sets this doctrine against the realities of grief. Amaia Salazar recounts the death of her infant brother when she was twelve: her mother tried to revive him, then withdrew from her family, stopped speaking to her husband and surviving child, and eventually attempted suicide before being admitted to a psychiatric clinic. The memory exposes the cruelty of treating a new baby as compensation for a dead one. The suffering is not abstract or interchangeable; it reshapes a family and leaves those who survive with the consequences.

Yolanda Berrueta’s experience reveals another consequence of the cult’s practices: the disappearance of a child’s body can make a bereaved mother’s belief seem like madness until evidence changes its meaning. A priest recalls that Yolanda repeatedly insisted her children were not in their grave. He had officiated at the funeral and seen coffins lowered into the ground, and therefore believed the bodies were there. After the grave was opened, Yolanda explains that she had confused the coffins while medicated, but that her central suspicion was right: her baby’s body had been stolen. Her insistence had not been simply a failure to accept death; it had also been a response to a real absence.

Investigation and Narrative Significance

Amaia connects the group’s history to several strands of the investigation. The timing of Rosario’s journey after leaving the clinic suggests that she and Berasategui stopped somewhere before reaching the house where Ibai was taken. Elena Ochoa’s account leads Amaia to the former group’s farmhouse, now a renovated mansion occupied by an affluent couple who belonged to the original circle. The couple admit knowing Berasategui, and a neighbor identifies his car at the property. Their claim that their daughter died before age two during a trip to the United Kingdom is unsupported by a death certificate, hospital record, or evidence of the journey. The case also brings Amaia’s own twin sister’s death into a pattern of infant deaths whose families had connections to the house and group.

The ritual doctrine also provides a lens through which Amaia rereads the murders of Ainhoa Elizasu, Carla Huarte, and Anne Arbizu. The killer’s treatment of the bodies—exposing them, removing pubic hair, arranging their hands palms-up, and placing a sweet where maturity would be marked—suggests an attempt to return the victims symbolically to childhood and purity. The ritualized presentation echoes the cult’s idea of children as offerings, although the investigation’s links between these crimes and the cult do not make every detail of its beliefs objectively true.

By the end, the cult’s concealment has been broken and its members have been arrested. After the investigation, Amaia stands at Muniartea Bridge and wonders whether the river has been cleaned and the offense washed away. She then weeps in Engrasi’s arms for what has been lost, desecrated, and killed. The final movement from investigative evidence to grief gives the subject its force: the cult may describe death as an offering and loss as a debt that can be settled, but the surviving families are left with bodies, absences, and pain that cannot be exchanged for promised power.