The Lesaka Ritual Infant Killing was a ritual murder committed by members of a secret group in Navarra in 1979. The child’s parents offered her to the group when she was only days old; after the killing, her body was taken away and never recovered. The case entered the investigation not through an ordinary homicide file but through a protected witness’s confession, and its account exposed how a community organized around spiritual promises could turn a child’s life into the price of its imagined power.

The group and its hidden leader

In 1979, a group settled in a farmhouse in Lesaka. Its eventual witness had arrived in Navarra at twenty-five, after finishing university, to spend San Fermín with friends. A young woman invited them to the house she shared with others. At first, the place appeared to be an unconventional commune devoted to tradition, human nature, and the forces of the natural world. Its members grew marijuana, listened to the wind, danced around a fire, and held talks for possible recruits, including local people and tourists drawn by spirituality, witchcraft, and spiritism.

The group spoke often of a man called Tabese, but the witness did not meet him during that first summer. When most of the visitors left, the witness was invited to stay; in September, the commune’s more coercive and demanding character began to emerge. Tabese arrived unpredictably, did not live at the farmhouse, and left the members waiting for his return. He presented himself as a psychologist or psychiatrist, and the witness later recalled him as a wealthy, polished, and powerfully charismatic figure. The group’s attachment to him was bound up with the authority he claimed: he instructed them in what to do and how to do it, while promising access to power and knowledge. In the later investigation, the leader was identified as Xabier Markina, known to the group as Tabese.

Tabese taught the members to understand offerings as the means of restoring an ancient relationship with supernatural forces. He invoked forgotten religion, extraordinary beings associated with the region, prehistoric monuments, and ley lines, presenting sacrifice as an exchange through which the group could obtain what it wanted. The witness described the early animal sacrifices as part of this progression: the group believed it had received favors, and its sense of power grew as the demands for offerings increased. In that framework, ritual was not an isolated ceremony but a system of obligations, with the leader defining the rules and the group interpreting its supposed gains as confirmation that those rules worked.

The group’s early outward appearance and its later practices stood in stark contrast. Newcomers could be drawn by communal living, fireside dancing, and the promise of spiritual discovery; the witness’s account, however, traced how that invitation developed into submission to Tabese’s instructions and a willingness to participate in escalating sacrifices. After the infant’s death, the group dispersed across the country within months. Tabese did not return, and the witness said that the parents who had made the offering were the last people left at the farmhouse.

The victim and the ritual

The group’s account of the killing rested on a set of rules that gave the child’s age, sex, and religious status a specific meaning. The witness said the victim had to be a girl, younger than two years old, and unbaptized. In the group’s reasoning, baptism constituted an offering and commitment to another god, so a baptized child could not serve their purpose. These were not incidental details: they distinguished the intended victim from other children and placed the killing within a claimed ritual order.

Age was explained through the idea of transition. The witness said that from birth until the second year, a child’s soul remained between states and was therefore considered especially suitable for an offering. The same account described another transition as children approached adulthood, but claimed that an infant’s death could more readily be explained as natural than an adolescent’s. Separately, Jonan Etxaide explained the broader belief that children under two moved between two worlds and could perceive both, making them, in the group’s mythology, effective intermediaries with spiritual forces. These explanations record the perpetrators’ asserted beliefs, not evidence that the supernatural claims were true.

The witness eventually stated the prescribed manner of death: the child was to be sacrificed to Inguma by being deprived of air, and her body was then to be surrendered as an offering. He could not explain the purpose beyond repeating the ritual requirement, and he did not know what happened to the child’s body after it was taken. The group’s rule that sacrifices be made in same-sex, same-age cohorts further framed the killing as one instance in a cycle, rather than as an act directed only at an individual victim. The witness said Tabese had taught them that the cycle had to be completed, though he could not supply a reason for the sex-based rule.

The account also exposes the distance between the group’s ritual system and the human cost it demanded. The child’s parents, not the absent leader, were said to have offered and killed her; the witness insisted that this had to be done by them. He later described how some women were depressed after participating and were urged to have another child immediately, while some had not known what their husbands intended. Those details show how the group’s rules extended beyond the ceremony itself, shaping family life and treating the birth of another child as part of the aftermath.

The confession and the sealed case

The killing came to light through a confession made years after the group had broken apart. Three years before Sarasola described the case to Amaia Salazar, a former member went with a lawyer to a police station in Madrid, saying that remorse had become unbearable. His account concerned the group’s 1979 settlement in Lesaka, but it did not enter the ordinary channels through which Amaia knew the open homicide cases in her city. Because the alleged crime had taken place in Navarra, the matter was transferred to a court in Pamplona.

The judge imposed investigative secrecy because of the allegation’s sensitivity, the public alarm it might provoke, and the harm an unproven accusation could do to those implicated. Security was an additional concern: the man who reported the crime lived in hiding under police and ecclesiastical protection. Among the accused were lawyers, doctors, and an educator, many of them parents. The case therefore joined a concealed infant killing to a network of apparently established people, while the procedure intended to protect the investigation also kept its existence from the local detective whose work it most closely resembled.

When Sarasola disclosed the case, Amaia initially rejected the possibility that a homicide in the area could have escaped her notice. The sealed proceedings and the Madrid origin of the confession explained how it had remained outside her files. As she listened, she connected the Lesaka testimony to the missing infant’s grave, Elena Ochoa’s death, and the earlier suspicions surrounding the Baztán cases. She asked whether the child’s body had been found. It had not: the witness knew only that it had been taken away and could not say whether it was buried in the forest or elsewhere.

The case’s unresolved physical evidence sharpened the parallel Amaia saw with a separate killing in a farmhouse in Baztán. The Lesaka witness could establish that a child had been taken, but not where her remains lay; the absence left the crime without the confirmation a recovered body might have supplied. For Amaia, the confession did more than reveal a hidden homicide: it made an apparently private local suspicion legible as part of a larger pattern, while leaving the central question of the victim’s final resting place unanswered.

The killing within a wider pattern

Years later, the Lesaka testimony gave Amaia Salazar a framework for rereading crimes that had already unsettled her. At the police station, she placed the ritual account beside the profiles and autopsy photographs of Ainhoa Elizasu, Carla Huarte, and Anne Arbizu. Their bodies had been strangled with a fine cord, carried to the Baztán River, and arranged with their hands open, palms turned upward. Their clothing had been torn, their pubic hair shaved, and their hair parted into two halves. Amaia understood these gestures as an attempt to make the victims appear offered, innocent, and returned to childhood. The resemblance to the Lesaka witness’s language of transition and offering sharpened her interpretation, but it did not establish that the same people committed both crimes.

The connection lay in a ritual vocabulary that made childhood itself a claimed source of power: in Lesaka, the group selected an unbaptized infant and demanded her body; in Amaia’s reconstruction of the later murders, the killer staged older girls as if forcing them backward into a state of purity. The distinction matters as much as the echo. The Lesaka case was a confession to a specific killing whose victim’s remains remained missing, while the riverbank murders were a separate series that Amaia examined through their repeated bodily arrangements. Together, they made the witness’s account more than a concealed case: it helped her recognize how sacrificial ideas could persist in different crimes without making their perpetrators or circumstances interchangeable.