Protected Witness Reveals the Sacrifice Ritual

The revelation by a protected witness turns the secret group’s vague language of ancient powers and offerings into a specific account of ritualized child killing. Speaking with Amaia Salazar in the presence of Sarasola, the unnamed former member describes how Xabier Markina, whom he knew as Tabese, taught the group its beliefs and dictated the conditions of its sacrifices. His testimony also reveals the painful history that led him to confess, while leaving important limits in place: he says he cannot speak about the sacrifice itself and does not know exactly what happened to the child from Lesaka.

The Witness and the Group

The man is thin and nervously toys with the loose wedding ring on his finger. At Sarasola’s request, he agrees to speak, though his deference to the priest contrasts with his evident distress. Asked about his time in Lesaka, he recalls arriving at twenty-five, after university, with friends who had come to spend San Fermín. A young woman invited them to a shared house, which initially seemed to him like an unconventional commune devoted to tradition, human nature, and the forces of the natural world.

The group grew cannabis, listened to the wind and the earth, danced around a fire, and held talks for possible recruits. Visitors included local people and tourists seeking spirituality, witchcraft, magic, or spiritualism. The members spoke often about Tabese, but the witness did not meet him during that first phase. When summer ended and most visitors left, the witness was invited to stay. He says that this was when the group’s real character began to emerge.

He met Tabese in September. The man’s wealth, clothes, manner, and sexual magnetism made a powerful impression on the witness, who remembers that members seemed to love him and would do whatever he asked. Tabese appeared unpredictably; his arrivals turned the house into a celebration, and his departures left the group waiting for him to return. The witness says he remained with the group for nearly a year and was drawn into its teachings and practices.

Tabese’s Teaching and the Logic of Offering

According to the witness, Tabese presented himself as a guide to ancient witchcraft and a return to traditional relations with primordial forces. He taught that the first inhabitants of the Baztán region had marked the land with megaliths and ley lines, and that powerful presences could be awakened through offerings. In the group’s account of its own beliefs, people and spirits had once maintained a mutually beneficial relationship; sacrifices were the price paid to obtain favors.

The witness says that early results made the members feel powerful, even godlike. As they received what they understood as favors, however, the demands for further offerings increased. His testimony presents this escalation not as an independently verified supernatural exchange, but as the group’s explanation for its actions and the growing obligations it imposed on its members.

When Amaia asks how the expected result was achieved, the witness first begs not to discuss the sacrifice. After Sarasola presses him, he explains that the child was to be sacrificed to evil, to Inguma, by being deprived of air, and that the body had to be surrendered as an offering. He does not know the purpose behind that specific procedure. Asked whether this was what had been done to the child from Lesaka, he insists that he does not know; in his account, the parents themselves had to carry out the act as part of the conditions of the ritual.

Rules for the Victim and the Body

The witness identifies a set of restrictions that shaped the group’s intended victim: the child had to be a girl, younger than two years, and unbaptized. Baptism was excluded because, in the group’s reasoning, it already constituted an offering and commitment to another god. The victim’s body, once killed, was not to be kept; it had to be ceded and taken to the place where the offering would perform its function. The witness cannot identify that place.

He and Jonan Etxaide discuss the age rule as a period of transition. The witness says that the group regarded the soul between birth and two years as still in transition and therefore especially suitable for an offering. He extends the idea to childhood more broadly, describing another transformation as children approach adulthood, but notes that an infant’s death could be more easily explained away than an adolescent’s. The group’s ritual claims thus turn developmental stages into a rationale for selecting and killing children.

The witness cannot explain why the victims had to be girls. He says Tabese taught that sacrifices were made in groups of the same sex, age, and circumstances, and that Inguma took a number of victims until a cycle was complete. He also describes the human consequences within families: men were often the most committed participants, while some women fell into depression after a sacrifice and were urged to have another child quickly. Some women, he says, did not know what their husbands intended; he had heard that certain cases ended very badly. Having later lost his own child, he says he cannot imagine loving a replacement child and might even resent one if forced into that role.

Confession, Loss, and the Case’s Wider Pattern

The witness recounts that after the group dispersed, he found work, started businesses, became wealthy, married, and had a son. When the boy was eight and suffering from cancer, he recognized a former group member among the doctors treating him. That man suggested the illness could be resolved through another sacrifice. Faced with his child’s suffering, the witness considered the proposal, but his son died a few months later. A week after the death, the witness went to a police station and confessed. He says that afterward he lost his job, money, wife, home, and friends, and had nowhere left to turn.

The testimony also touches Amaia’s family history. When she shows him a photograph of her mother as a young woman, he recognizes her as a member of the group and recalls that she was pregnant when he knew her. He cannot say whether she took part in a sacrifice. The identification raises a personal connection for Amaia without resolving that uncertainty.

Later, while reviewing the Basajaun case, Amaia recalls the witness’s account of the age of transition alongside the murders of Ainhoa Elizasu, Carla Huarte, and Anne Arbizu. She examines the killings’ ritualized details: the victims were suffocated with a thin cord, their clothes torn, their pubic hair removed and replaced by a small cake, and their hands positioned palms upward as if in offering. Their bodies had been carried to the Baztán River. The remembered testimony gives Amaia a framework for reading the crimes’ imagery of innocence and a return to childhood; it does not, by itself, establish that every feature of the group’s sacrificial doctrine explains those murders.