They investigate the death and possible rape of a one-year-old girl in the custody of the Honduran State
The Honduran Public Ministry announced on Monday the opening of an ex officio investigation into the death and possible rape in a home of a 12-month-old girl who was in state custody.
A multidisciplinary team made up of agents from the Special Prosecutor for the Protection of Children and Adolescents, the Special Prosecutor for Crimes Against Life and the Technical Criminal Investigation Agency is carrying out “ex officio investigations” to clarify the causes of death, the Public Ministry said in a statement.
The girl died last Friday allegedly due to malnutrition at the Mario Catarino Rivas Hospital in San Pedro Sula, the second largest city in Honduras, where pediatricians detected that the minor was allegedly raped, an end that the Public Ministry is investigating.
One of the girl's relatives told reporters on Saturday that the minor had been in the custody of the Directorate for Children, Adolescents and Family (Dinaf) for three months, allegedly due to severe malnutrition.
Dinaf, according to the Public Ministry, “dealt with the institutionalization of the little girl in a center created to care for minors with obvious malnutrition pictures so that, with timely care, she could recover from a supposed acute malnutrition picture.”
The investigation in progress
The multidisciplinary team confiscated the girl's clinical file at the state hospital, took a statement from her parents, medical personnel and Dinaf, among others, he added.
Atic prosecutors and investigators visited the home where the minor was located over the weekend and are awaiting the results of the legal medical autopsy to determine the cause of death.
The Public Ministry indicated that the result of the autopsy will be “fundamental” to confirm whether the girl suffered sexual abuse and recalled that “any precise detail on the matter must be of the exclusive knowledge of the authorities of the justice system for purposes of investigation and deduction of criminal responsibilities to those who correspond”.
the official version
The director of Dinaf, Lizeth Coello, said that, according to the preliminary report, the girl died of “generalized sepsis.”
“The girl, despite the care, developed severe pneumonia, for which she was taken to the emergency room and again admitted to the Mario Catarino Rivas Hospital in a septic state on July 15,” Coello said at a press conference.
Between 2021 and 2022, Honduras registered around 3,112 complaints of child sexual abuse of minors between the ages of 8 and 15, and most of them remain unpunished, according to official figures.