North Costa Rica: Police on trail of armed gang

A shopkeeper from Llano Verde de Los Chiles, near the Nicaraguan border, alerted the police about the armed gang last Monday night. The shopkeeper, identified as Juan Tijerino, said that the men were wearing military greens and carried heavy firearms. At that time, the group was just one mile from the Border Police post in Jocote de Cutris.

On Tuesday, a Public Force unit patrolled the area and interviewed several residents, but none reported having seen the gang.

However, at 10 p.m. Tuesday, the Civil Guard Post in Los Chiles reported that the armed group had been sighted by a farmer, who asserted that he talked to the men.

Allegedly, one of the men asked the farmer whether the police at the Concho de Pocosol post were making the rounds of the area.

They also asked him whether he knew two men, identified as Eliomar and Chico. The first is a guard at the Placer Dome Mining Company, a Canadian firm operating in the Crucitas de Cutris area.

A similar version on the group of armed men was rendered at the Civil Guard Post in Los Chiles by another farmer, identified only as Guevara, who said he had seen the group less than a mile away from Tijerino's grocery store.

Guevara asserted that the men carried AK-47 sub-machine guns and other military equipment, so he decided to hide and was not able to see in which direction they moved.

Police sources admitted that they fear that the armed gang is planning a kidnapping or a robbery in the area. Last December, there were several robberies in the La Trocha de los Chiles area and in one of them a woman identified as Dunia Rodríguez was killed.

It was in the same area where, in August 1996, Huiete Sierd Zijlstra and wife Jetty Cuors, a Dutch couple, were kidnapped by a group of Nicaraguans. They were held captive for 23 days and were released only after a $600,000 ransom was paid to their kidnappers.