2016 Rio Olympics Logo Brazilian authorities arrested 10 suspects Thursday in an anti-terror operation carried out 15 days prior to the opening ceremony of the Rio Olympics, Justice Minister Alexandre de Moraes said. "This was a suspected terrorist cell .. that went from exchanging suspicious messages online to making preparations" for a possible attack, De Moraes said at a news conference, ad...

Screenshot of KAT.crCHICAGO — Federal authorities in Chicago have charged the alleged owner of today’s most-visited illegal file-sharing website with criminal copyright infringement and have seized domain names associated with the website. ARTEM VAULIN, 30, of Kharkiv, Ukraine, allegedly owns and operates Kickass Torrents, or KAT, a commercial website that since 2008 has enabled users to illeg...

By Wendy Anders Multiple institutions worked together to build a coastal monitoring station, Estación Cipancí, to strengthen protection, sustainable use, and monitoring of the waters, communities, and beaches in the Gulf of Nicoya, officials announced yesterday. The station will support joint environmental and socio-economic projects to be carried out by the National Conservation Areas Syste...

By Wendy Anders Source: U.S. Embassy   During a routine round along the Caribbean coast this morning at 2:00 am, Costa Rica coast guard officials found a giant leatherback sea turtle tied up, ostensibly to later be killed. They released the animal, which had been tied up at Barra de Pacuare, a coastal village in between Tortuguero National Park and Limón port town. Police and coast guard a...

Source: OIJOn Friday afternoon, agents from the Office of Judicial Investigations (Spanish initials: OIJ) arrested a 31-year old male expat who is alleged to have run a sexual extortion scheme against his lover. The suspect is from Panama and has been residing in Costa Rica for a few years. A couple of years ago, he met a 35-year old woman with whom he established a romantic and sexual relatio...

By Wendy Anders The judicial branch in a press statement summarizing this week’s activity noted that the Alajuela Criminal Court found two men guilty of illegal drug dealing, and a woman guilty of money laundering. The court sentenced a Hungarian man by the last name of Halasz to 10 years in jail, and another man named Otárola to eight years. This same court sentenced a Mexican woman by ...

Source: Wikimedia CommonsTwo U.S. citizens and a Canadian citizen have pleaded guilty for their roles in a $9 million “sweepstakes fraud” scheme to defraud hundreds of U.S. residents, many of them elderly, announced Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Jill Westmoreland Rose of the Western District of North Carolina. Jeff...

Wikimedia CommonsDrug interdiction agents in Panama seized a major shipment of pink cocaine that was intended to reach Costa Rica before being repackaged and smuggled to the United States and Europe. According to a news report filed by Manuel Estrada of daily tabloid Diario Extra, the National Police of Colombia worked together with Panamanian law enforcement to arrest Alejandro Arboleda Uribe...

By Wendy Anders A 500-strong special police operations force set up by Public Security Minister Gustavo Mata last October has been working hard to make a dent in local illegal drug-related activities. The Costa Rican police has made over 25,000 illegal drug-related arrests throughout the country since then. These crimes, which include everything from drug possession and drug dealing to mo...

By Wendy Anders The trial of a woman by the last name of Amaya accused of attempting to kill a woman named Barrantes begins tomorrow, Wednesday, July 13, at 8:00am at the Limón Criminal Court. Amaya and Barrantes apparently shared a residence in Batáan, Limón, according to the judicial press office. On August 29, 2009 when both women were at home, it appears that Amaya grabbed a bottle of...

By Wendy Anders Yesterday, the Costa Rican Spanish-language digital news media, AM Prensa, reported that a boy of 14 has allegedly been having sexual relations with his 11-year-old sister who is now pregnant. Although the alleged relations occurred several months ago, it wasn’t until three weeks ago that the girl sought care at the Liberia Hospital, who then reported the case to local child pr...

Source: LigaPokemonCR Facebook Although the Pokemon GO mobile app has not been formally released in Costa Rica, gamers are finding way to install the new game on their iPhones and Android-powered devices. Pokemon GO is an augmented reality game that requires mobile devices equipped with Internet connectivity, camera, GPS, and Bluetooth. The game is the latest iteration of an entertainment e...

By Wendy Anders At 11:25 Friday night, police checking vehicles on the San Jose-Caribbean Route 32 found a surprise tucked in the trunk of one car. A newborn three-toed sloth was discovered in a cardboard box during a routine stop-and-search operation near the Zurqui Tunnel. The vehicle’s owner, of the last name Chávez and resident of Atenas, Alajuela, was heading towards San José from Si...

William Albert Ulmer, aka “Bill Ulmer,” 49, of West Dickinson, North Dakota, was sentenced today to three years in prison for traveling with a stolen passport and aggravated identity theft charges, announced Jill Westmoreland Rose, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina. U.S. District Judge Robert J. Conrad, Jr. also sentenced Ulmer to three years of supervised release after he i...

Residents of an immigrant community mostly populated by Nicaraguan families in Costa Rica reclaimed a dwelling formerly used as a dangerous "bunker," a crack house or drug den, after a police operation. According to a press release issued by the Ministry of Public Security, officers from the Operational Support Group (Spanish initials: GAO) and from other tactical teams were assembled to raid t...

Cartoon by Clay Jones By Britt Nelson Editor’s note: The views expressed by guest columnists are not necessarily those of The Costa Rica Star, its advertisers, or its staff “Shots Fired,” “Active Shooters,” “Coordinated Attack,” “Ambush in Dallas,” “5 Police Officers Shot Dead, 7 Wounded” screamed the headlines across national television Thursday night in the United States of America and...

The subject wanted in the Villarreal, Guanacaste stabbing. By Wendy Anders This article has been updated to include new information from police sources: Yesterday, two separate murders of women in Guanacaste have kept police and investigators very busy, and the local community very concerned. The first, apparently a lover's quarrel between two Nicaraguans, occurred in the presence of ...

Source: Fuerza Publica John Wesley Saatio, a slippery sex offender from the United States who escaped after being extradited from Costa Rica, was recaptured in Florida right before fireworks were set off to celebrate the Fourth of July. According to a news report filed by Hana Frenette of the Pensacola News Journal, Mr. Saatio was intercepted by deputies from the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s...

Flickr Commons Police around the globe arrested 79 suspected members of an international child pornography network on Monday. The arrests were made in 18 different countries, including the United States, Spain, and several Latin American countries, following 200 raids in 47 cities as part of Operation No Borders. At least 19 of the arrests were made in Spain, primarily in Madrid. Span...

Flickr Commons Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson today announced that four individuals have been variously charged in a 57-count indictment with running a massive Internet-based sports gambling ring that operated all over the United States and controlled an offshore office. The billion-dollar operation allegedly catered to thousands of bettors, accepted $927 million in wagers on NFL game...

Source; UNHCR On 6 and 7 July 2016, the Organization of American States and UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, will convene in San José, Costa Rica, a high-level roundtable meeting on refugees and displaced people from the Northern Triangle of Central America and the urgent need to find solutions to this growing protection situation. The two-day event in San José, the first international meeting...

The tents of Cuban migrant refugees are seen at a border post with Panama in Paso Canoas, Costa Rica, earlier in December Photo: Reuters OMX The United States on Thursday included Haiti, Venezuela and Belize on its list of countries that are not doing enough to combat people trafficking, a measure that could lead to sanctions, while Colombia and Chile were given the best marks in the hemispher...

Guanacaste local drug group structure. Courtesy of Ministry of Public Security. By Wendy Anders Cocaine might be harder to come by these days in Guanacaste, especially from your local seller. Liberia, capital of the Guanacaste province of Costa Rica, was the scene of a large drug bust this morning when Drug Control Police (PCD in Spanish) captured three ring leaders and several underling...

ARCHIVE / ILLUSTRATIVE (Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Public Security) By Wendy Anders Over the weekend, Costa Rican immigration police cooperated in a regional sting operation, El Operativo Mesoamérica, to detain alleged human traffickers, reported Radio Monumental yesterday. At least 25 arrests were made in Guatemala, El Salvador, Panamá, Honduras, and in Costa Rica, where eight we...

Source: Facebook Fabiane Niclotti, who was crowned Miss Brazil 2004, was found dead inside her apartment in Gramado, a city in Rio Grande do Sul state, but there were no signs of violence, police said Wednesday. The 31-year-old model's brother called police because she was not answering her telephone. Police found Niclotti's body on Tuesday night and there were no signs of forced entry o...

Illustrative image. (Flickr Commons) A young man who came to Costa Rica to help foreign language students at institutions of higher learning is currently recovering from multiple stab wounds sustained after a violent robbery. According to a recent news report filed by Yaslin Cabezas of online news daily Costa Rica Hoy, the man is of French nationality and has been solely identified by the l...

Agents from the Office of Judicial Investigations (Spanish initials: OIJ) arrested a 30-year old man for allegedly attempting to sexually extort her on social media in Costa Rica. According to a recent news report filed by Allan Chacon Soto of daily tabloid Diario Extra, the arrest took place at a public park in Hatillo, a series of populous districts located just south of the capital city of C...

Wikimedia Commons Commuters stuck in traffic during Friday morning in the eastern districts of San Jose were surprised to see a naked man calmly walking down the street and occasionally attempting to direct the flow of traffic. The incident occurred in San Pedro, precisely at the traffic circle that surrounds the Hispanic Heritage Fountain. According to a television report broadcast by nati...

Source: Fuerza Publica Even after a press conference, questions remain about the escape and subsequent capture of John Wesley Saatio, a registered sex offender from the United States who managed to escape from a detention cell in Costa Rica a couple of days ago. Mr. Saatio was taken into custody by Fuerza Publica officers on foot patrol in San Miguel of Desamparados, not far from the workin...

Wikimedia Commons One of the most mysterious and dangerous crime figures in the world is currently in the custody of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and his life of crime may have been encouraged by an attorney from Costa Rica. The life of Paul Calder Le Roux, a 43-year old Caucasian man born in the former African nation of Rhodesia, seems to have been envisioned by...

Source: Fuerza Publica A slippery sex offender and fugitive from the United States is once again on the run in Costa Rica, and allegations of an inside job in this matter have not been answered. The fugitive is known as John Wesley Saatio. As reported by The Costa Rica Star on June 17, Mr. Saatio was arrested as the result of an investigation conducted by by a neighborhood watch group and p...

Wikimedia Commons Algeciras, Spain, Jun 20 (EFE).- The Spanish Civil Guard in the southern port of Algeciras seized 280 kilos (615 lbs.) of cocaine hidden in a container shipped from Brazil, the security corps reported in a statement. An investigation by Spain's Civil Guard aided by Brazilian police intelligence found the drug hidden in a container transporting a legal cargo of sugar. On...

Source: Fuerza Publica A scene straight out of a circus strongman act unfolded in Costa Rica about 10 days ago. John Wesley Saatio, a citizen of the United States, tried to bend the prison bars of the cell he was thrown into after an investigation by a neighborhood watch group and police in the coastal community of Jaco Beach. According to an official press release issued by Fuerza Publica,...

Source: Flick Commons By Britt Nelson Editor’s note: The views expressed by guest columnists are not necessarily those of The Costa Rica Star, its advertisers, or its staff The horrific Orlando murders are echoing and vibrating messages of love around the world like a stone thrown into a pond. Massive rallies are being held around the world in memory of those killed. United States Pre...

Orlando Police Twitter By Britt Nelson Editor’s note: The views expressed by guest columnists are not necessarily those of The Costa Rica Star, its advertisers, or its staff Another mass shooting has occurred -- this time in Florida – and it’s the worst mass murder by a single shooter in the history of the United States. This shooting is getting real political real fast due to its nexus ...

Source: Fuerza Publica Los Angeles, CA -  Today, on World Oceans Day, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is proud to announce its latest campaign to defend, conserve and protect our oceans. The campaign, Operation Jairo II, will span three countries including the United States, Honduras and Costa Rica to protect endangered sea turtles. The launch comes on the heels of Sea Shepherd’s announce...

Archive San Salvador, Jun 7 (EFE).- The former director of El Salvador's penitentiaries, Nelson Rauda, was sent to prison on Tuesday for allegedly forming part of a network that authorized privileges and perks for imprisoned gang members during a truce with those groups from 2012-2014. Rauda, who had been a fugitive since early May - when authorities arrested 18 people, including top police...

Illustrative image. (Flickr Commons) Caracas, Jun 6 (EFE).- The body of Italian diplomat Mauro Monciatti, an administrative official at Italy's consulate in Caracas, was found at his home in an eastern Caracas neighborhood, fellow diplomat Lorenzo Salinas confirmed to EFE on Monday. Monciatti, 60, died from blunt trauma to the skull, an official with the Cicpc criminal investigative unit, w...

Flickr Commons Easy access to online social networks, themes portrayed in modern Latin American soap operas and the open discussion of family finances are causal factors driving young girls to prostitute themselves in Costa Rica. In mid-March, the incident of a 40-year old man reportedly sought to pay a 13-year old girl 150,000 colones (about $300) in exchange for a sexual session was repor...

Many suspects awaiting trial are housed alongside convicted criminal in Costa Rica's La Reforma Prison, pictured. (ICR/CRS Archive) The National Association of Criminology Researchers (Spanish acronym: ANIC) is trying to file a lawsuit against the Ministry of Justice in Costa Rica over the release of nearly 6,000 convicted criminals who can no longer be housed by the national prison system. ...