Quito – (AFP)
Friday, in Colombia, a former Ecuadorian policeman was arrested on suspicion of killing his wife in a crime that shook Ecuador, according to what the Ecuadorian government announced.
“The amazing effort of the Ecuadorian and Colombian police and the Colombian armed forces led to the arrest of Germain Caceres in Colombia,” Ecuadorian Interior Minister Juan Zapata tweeted.
Ecuadorean President Guillermo Laso also wrote on Twitter that Germain Caceres, “wanted in the murder of Maria Belén Bernal, has been located and arrested,” noting that “he will face the Ecuadorian judiciary as soon as he arrives in the country.”
Germain Caceres is a former policeman suspected of killing his wife, lawyer María Belén Bernal, 34, who disappeared on September 11 following entering an officer training college on the outskirts of Quito to visit her husband.
Her body was found ten days later on a hill near the college.
This case shook the population of the small country in the Andes Mountains region, where 276 murders of women have been recorded since the beginning of the year, according to a feminist non-governmental organization that monitors violence once morest women.
The victim’s mother, Elizabeth Otavalo, confirmed that her daughter was a victim of a “state crime” because she was killed in a police facility.
“I am fighting a monster, which is the state,” she said in a recent interview with Agence France-Presse, adding that “the institutions that are supposed to protect our rights do not help us.”
