The Lesaka group’s infant sacrifice is disclosed through the confession of a former member, who describes a young girl being offered and killed by her own parents under the group’s direction. The account links the crime to a belief system that treated a child’s age, sex, baptismal status, manner of death, and body as parts of a prescribed offering. It also shows how a community that first presented itself as a search for tradition and spiritual experience came to demand the life of a child—and then dissolved around the act it had committed.

From Commune to Cult

The witness traces his involvement to a summer visit to Lesaka with friends during San Fermín. At twenty-five and newly graduated from university, he was invited to a house shared by a group that initially seemed to be exploring tradition, human nature, and the forces of the natural world. Its members grew marijuana, gathered to listen to the wind and the earth, danced around a fire, and held talks for potential recruits, including locals and tourists drawn by spirituality, witchcraft, and spiritualism associated with Baztán.

The group often spoke about Tabese and his supposed knowledge, although the witness did not meet him during the first part of that summer. When most of the visitors left at the end of the season, the witness was invited to remain. The change in the group’s character followed: in September he met Xabier Tabese, a wealthy-seeming and charismatic man whose authority rested as much on his powerful personal appeal as on his teachings. The witness recalled that the group loved him and believed he gave them power; its members were prepared to do what he asked.

Tabese presented the group’s practices as a return to an ancient religion rooted in the origins of the land. He taught that megalithic monuments and ley lines marked the presence of spirits, and that offerings could awaken those forces and secure favors. The first offerings were small animal sacrifices, performed according to instructions. The group felt powerful when it believed that its actions had produced results, but, in the witness’s account, each favor was followed by demands for more. He lived with the group for almost a year, gaining access to what he remembered as extraordinary knowledge, power, and experience before the human sacrifice took place.

The Sacrifice and Its Rules

The witness refused to describe the sacrifice itself in detail. He nevertheless confirmed that it happened, that all the members participated, and that the child’s own parents offered her and put her to death. Afterward, the body was taken away. This distinction matters: the account establishes the killing and the group’s collective involvement, while withholding a fuller description of the act and leaving some details of what happened to the body uncertain.

In explaining the group’s ritual logic, the witness said that the child was to be sacrificed to evil, to Inguma, and deprived of air in a manner associated with that being. Her body was then to be surrendered as an offering. He also described the prescribed victim as a girl under two years old who had not been baptized. Baptism, in the group’s belief, constituted an offering and commitment to another god, so an unbaptized child was required for their rite. The testimony presents these conditions as the group’s rules, not as independently established supernatural facts.

Age was given a particular significance. The witness said that, from birth until the second year, a child’s soul was understood to be in transition and therefore especially suitable for an offering. The explanation shared by Jonan was that some cultures considered children under two to move between two worlds, able to perceive both and thus serve as a vehicle for communication with spiritual realms. The witness also described a later transition as children approached adulthood, but said that an infant’s death was easier to explain away than the death of an adolescent. The rules therefore combined a spiritual claim about transition with a practical advantage for concealing or rationalizing a death.

The group’s instructions also treated victims as belonging to cycles defined by sex, age, and supposedly identical circumstances. The witness said Tabese claimed that the offerings had to follow those patterns, though the witness did not know why. He recalled that men were generally the most committed participants; some women who took part fell into depression, and the group’s response was to urge them to have another child quickly. Some women, he added, may not have known what their husbands intended to do. His account makes clear that the ritual’s claimed order depended on coercion and secrecy within families as well as on the group’s collective belief.

Dispersal and the Confession

The sacrifice did not consolidate the group. Within days, members began to leave, and in less than a month they had disappeared. Tabese never returned. The witness was among the last to go; eventually, only the couple who had made the offering remained. The sudden dispersal leaves the killing as both the group’s culminating act and the point after which its shared life came apart.

For years the witness did not see the other members again. He found work, started businesses, became wealthy, married, and had a son. When the boy developed cancer at eight, the witness encountered a former member working as a doctor during a hospital visit. The doctor said the illness could be resolved if the witness made a sacrifice. Faced with his son’s suffering, he considered the proposal, but his child died a few months later. A week afterward, the witness went to a police station and confessed. He said that after he reported what the group had done, he lost his work, money, wife, home, and friends, and had nowhere left to turn. His confession thus connects the original killing to a second moment of temptation: the old doctrine resurfaced when another parent confronted the possible loss of a child, but this time the witness disclosed the group’s crimes rather than repeating its offering.

What the Testimony Reveals

The scene of disclosure changes the meaning of the group’s earlier language about tradition, nature, and spiritual power. The fire, the talk of ancient forces, and the promise that offerings would bring favors are not merely eccentric features of a commune in the witness’s account; they are the steps by which obedience to Tabese became a system demanding escalating sacrifices. The group’s abstract talk of transition is made brutally concrete by the victim’s age and the rules that required her to be a girl and unbaptized.

The testimony also places limits on what can be concluded. When asked whether the group had done the same to the girl from Lesaka, the witness said he did not know; he explained that following the ritual’s conditions was also the parents’ responsibility. His confession establishes the group’s killing of a girl and describes the doctrine surrounding it, but does not establish every connection between that sacrifice and other missing or dead children. That uncertainty is part of the revelation: the group’s practices are no longer only rumor, yet the fate of each child and the precise history of each offering must still be investigated.