By Sovereign Hager

Impunity Watch Reporter, South America

LIMA, Peru-Peru’s police chief was forced to fire his top organized crime investigator yesterday after evidence surfaced that he and several other police officials deliberately invented a story to divert attention from unlawful police killings. Police lied when they announced that they had broken up a criminal gang who roamed the Andes that killed peasant farmers and drained fat from their dead bodies to sell to European cosmetics manufacturers.

General Felix Murga went so far as to claim to have arrested four members of the “international criminal network,” responsible for thirty to sixty murders per year in the Huanuco province. Medical experts were skeptical about the validity of the story from the beginning, saying that there is no black market for human fat.

Government officials now believe that the police force was trying to divert attention from allegations that officers killed forty-six suspects in 2007 and 2008. The former deputy interior minister, Carlos Basombrio stated that “they were mainly trying to cover up the tremendous revelation of extrajudicial killings of criminals in the town of Trujillo.”

The police played a video of a suspect confessing to the “fat trafficking” scheme at the original press conference. The police even displayed two soft drink bottles full of what they claimed to be human fat sold for nearly 10,000 pounds per liter. Victims were reportedly lured into a jungle hut where they were bludgeoned to death, dismembered, and then candles were used to melt fat off of torsos.

Investigators in Huanuco complained that they were excluded from investigating the case and now believe that the four men arrested carried out one murder, linked to the cocaine trade. Investigators say that the cocaine traffickers in custody bottled the fat of the murder victim to intimidate rival drug traffickers.

The investigation into the “fat-trafficking” story began after an unnamed police official was quoted on Monday in a newspaper saying that local police were surprised about the allegations because they knew them “not to be true.”

For more information, please see:

AFP-Officer Dismissed in Peru “human-fat” Killings-2 December 2009

BBC-Peru Officer Suspended Over Human Fat Killer’s Lie-2 December 2009

USA Today-Peru’s Kill-For-Fat Gang May Be Deadly Police Hoax-1 December 2009