Police continued to guard the crime scene Thursday night. (Screen capture / Teletica Channel 7) Four suspects remained at large Friday morning after pulling off a brazen robbery of a branch of the Banco de Costa Rica (BCR) in Puriscal Thursday afternoon. According to the Judicial Investigative Organization (OIJ), the robbers gained access to the bank shortly after the branch closed to the p...

(Stock / ICR-CRS Archive) Costa Rica’s Ministry of Justice and Peace and Microsoft announced an agreement on Thursday by which the California-based software giant will provide free training in web development to select prisoners in Costa Rica’s penal system as part of a pilot project. Under the pilot program, 15 prisoners aged 22 to 53 currently housed in a Heredia prison known as the Centr...

Source: Kate del Castillo Twitter Mexico City, Feb 11 (EFE).- Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" (Shorty) Guzman's attorney said his client told him actress Kate del Castillo had not received any money from him and that he would be willing to testify on her behalf. In statements to Radio Formula, Jose Refugio Rodriguez said Guzman told him in a brief meeting at the Altiplano I maximum-...

(Archive image for illustrative purposes. OIJ photo) Costa Rica’s Minister of Public Security, Gustavo Mata is warning that significant budget cuts this year will result in a decrease in security and will weaken the efforts of law enforcement to combat crime. In an interview with the daily La Nacion published on Wednesday, Mata said that a reduction of 8 percent in the security ministry’s b...

Wikimedia Commons Mexico City, Feb 11 (EFE).- More than 50 people died Thursday in a prison fire and riot in the northern Mexican industrial city of Monterrey, local media reported. Authorities in Nuevo Leon state have not yet provided accurate information about the number of people who died - possibly including both inmates and prison officials - or were injured in the incident. Meanwhi...

Wikimedia Commons Agents from the Office of Judicial Investigation (Spanish initials: OIJ) arrested a bartender in Playa Sámara, province of Guanacaste, and charged him with dealing drugs at a popular beachfront bar frequented by North American expats, tourists and backpackers. According to a news report published by Andres Rojas Solano of daily tabloid Diario Extra, the arrest took place a...

(Archive image for illustrative purposes. OIJ photo) NEWS BRIEF In a series of coordinated raids Tuesday morning, agents of Costa Rica’s Judicial Investigative Police (OIJ) arrested a gang of five armed robbers who operated in Turrialba and surrounding communities, including a supervisor with the local police force. The arrested police officer was identified by the last names Cantillo Ra...

Dr. Mora Palma, the alleged ringleader of the group, faces more than 140 years in prison if convicted. (ICR/CRS Archive) The Criminal Court of San Jose ruled late last week that a criminal case against four Costa Rican doctors formerly employed by the public Calderon Guardia Hospital who were charged in 2013 in an illicit scheme to traffic in human organs should proceed to trial. Amongst th...

Former PLN lawmaker, Jorge Angulo faces eight criminal charges including influence peddling, extortion, and corruption. (ICR/CRS Archive) After years of delays and postponements, a Costa Rica criminal court has once again set a new trial date – this time in January 2017 – for former PLN lawmaker Jorge Angulo, who faces eight criminal charges including influence peddling, extortion, and corrupt...

(Entrance to the the Baldi Hot Springs Resort Hotel & Spa, located in La Fortuna de San Carlos. ICR Archive) Editor’s note: It should be noted that Alberto Rodriguez Baldi has never been charged with any crime in relation to the leaked intelligence reports, which date back three years, though Costa Rica’s Attorney General did indicate last month that there remains an “open investigation” –...

Roses now adorn the spot where the Jesuits were gunned down on the UCA's campus on Nov. 16, 1989. They were planted by Obdulio Ramos, husband to Julia Elba Ramos and father to Celina Ramos, who were killed along with the Jesuits. Photo by Charles Barry. Jesuits.org Washington, Feb 5 (EFE).- A U.S. district judge on Friday approved the extradition to Spain of a retired Salvadoran army officer w...

InfoBAE screenshot reporting on the incident Buenos Aires, Feb 7 (EFE).- Former Miss Argentina Rocio Fiorella Santa Cruz has been barred from leaving the country by federal judicial officials in Posadas, the capital of the northeastern Argentine province of Misiones, after she was allegedly involved in a traffic accident that caused the death of a transit inspector who was riding a motorcycle,...

Wikimedia Commons Mexico City, Feb 2 (EFE).- Three Colombians were arrested when they tried to fly out of the Mexico City airport with more than $1.5 million in cash hidden in their luggage, the Attorney General's Office said. "The three passengers tried to leave the country without declaring the foreign exchange they were carrying in their double-bottomed suitcases, registered to Copa Airl...

Denver, Feb 1 (EFE).- The legalization and sale of marijuana in Colorado since 2014 has reduced the operations of Mexican drug cartels both along the southern U.S. border as well as inside this country, according to a report released Monday by a group specializing in legal matters. The report, published by Lawyer Herald, uses recent statistics from several sources to conclude that the legal pro...

Alfredo Guzman Twitter LIMA, Peru — Mexican authorities will be looking into how the daughter of captured druglord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was able to trademark his nickname. Local media reported this week that one of the Sinaloa cartel leader’s daughters, Alejandra Gisselle Guzman, had successfully registered the term “El Chapo” with the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property. It… (m...

Flickr Commons COSTA RICA STAR NEWS BRIEF A criminal court in Osa, Puntarenas sentenced on Friday a 29-year-old Costa Rican man to 66 years in prison for the multiple rape of a French tourist in Dominical de Osa, Puntarenas in November 2014.   The court sentenced Javier Secundino Cortés Espinoza to a total of 66 years – 11 years each on six counts of rape.   However, u...

Flickr Commons U.S. Dept of Justice Press Release - Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Leslie R. Caldwell, Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, announced today that ARTHUR BUDOVSKY pled guilty to running a massive money laundering enterprise in connection with his operation of Liberty Reserve, a virtual cur...

Flickr Commons Mexico City, Jan 28 (EFE).- Mexican authorities sent the U.S. teenager who used an "affluenza" court defense after killing four people while driving drunk in Texas back to the United States to face court proceedings. "Ethan Couch, who entered at the Las Agujas immigration station ... after being found to be in an irregular administrative situation, was transferred this mornin...

Source: Flickr Commons Rio de Janeiro, Jan 25 (EFE).- The mayor of the Brazilian town of Goianesia do Para, Joao Gomes, was murdered Sunday night while he was attending a wake, local media reported. He was 62. Gomes, popularly known as "Russo," was attending a wake downtown in the municipality in the northern Brazilian state of Para, when two people wearing helmets that covered their faces,...

Mexican Soldiers at Checkpoint in 2009. Source: Wikimedia Chilpancingo, Mexico, Jan 27 (EFE).- Nine young people were kidnapped in different parts of the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, where a wave of violent crime has persisted despite the deployment of army soldiers and Federal Police, police sources said. Six people were abducted Tuesday by an armed group that burst into a motorcycl...

Orange County District Attorney Press Release - WESTMINSTER, Calif. – A “hard money” lender was convicted today of embezzling over $3 million from investors in a Ponzi real estate-mortgage investment fraud scheme. Thomas Franklin Tarbutton, 56, Newport Beach, was found guilty by a jury of 18 felony counts of grand theft, nine felony counts of forgery, 11 felony counts of using an untrue stateme...

Source: Kate del Castillo Twitter Mexico City, Jan 18 (EFE).- Mexican actress Kate del Castillo, who met with Joaquin "El Chapo" (Shorty) Guzman late last year while he was a still a fugitive, will be summoned by Mexican authorities to testify about her links to the powerful drug lord, a federal government source told EFE Monday. "Yes, they're going to call her to testify," the source said ...

Pixabay Commons The passports of two German citizens awaiting trial in Costa Rica cannot be held by judicial officials and must be immediately turned over to the Embassy. Such was the demand sent by the German Consulate to the Honorable Judge Yorleny Campos of the criminal court division, Second Circuit of San Jose, earlier this week. According to a news report filed by Daniel Chinchilla Sa...

CIMA Hospital in San Jose is often visited by medical tourists A slippery United States citizen of Persian ancestry claims that his health is rapidly deteriorating as he awaits trial in Costa Rica, and he is planning international demonstrations to call attention to his plight. Cyrus Anoushirvan Sepher, a Southern California resident in his early 50s, has been remanded to the San Sebastian ...

Flickr Commons Mexico City, Jan 16 (EFE).- The arrest in Spain of a former chairman of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, has roiled the political scene in Mexico, where the main opposition parties demanded that President Enrique Peña Nieto's administration take legal action against the politician. The center-right National Action Party, or PAN, insisted that the "full we...

Source: Facebook A swimsuit and lingerie model from Costa Rica will be evaluated by a prison psychiatrist in Nicaragua after she allegedly expressed strong suicidal intentions. Such was the report broadcast by Nicaraguan news radio station La Nueva Ya yesterday about Kathia Adriana Corella, who has been incarcerated in that country since early December. As previously reported by The Costa R...

Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman. Source: Wikimedia Commons The sons of Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman, the drug cartel boss recently captured by Mexican marines after a fierce firefight, may have met with a businessman in northern Costa Rica to discuss an operational expansion plan. Such was the matter discussed at the Legislative Assembly earlier today during a special session called after an intelligence rep...

Panama Canal Panama City, Jan 9 (EFE).- The consortium responsible for the main Panama Canal expansion project is the subject of a criminal complaint in the Central American country for allegedly inflating its cost overrun claims. National Bar Association Vice President Juan Carlos Arauz filed the complaint, to which EFE gained access, on Thursday with Panama's Attorney General's Office. ...

Wikimedia Commons Mexico City, Jan 7 (EFE).- Three fugtives wanted on criminal conspiracy, drug, sexual abuse and homicide charges by U.S. federal courts were extradited to the United States, the Mexican Attorney General's Office said. "The Foreign Relations Secretariat cited the corresponding agreements under which the government of our country granted the extradition requested by U.S. aut...

Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman. Source: Wikimedia Commons By Raul Cortes Mexico City, Jan 6 (EFE).- The spectacular escape of drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" (Shorty) Guzman from prison last July had all the ingredients for a movie and a feature film chronicling his breakout will hit Mexican theaters on Jan. 15, the distributor told EFE. "Chapo. El escape del siglo" (Chapo: The Escape of the Centur...

Wikimedia Commons Washington, Dec 30 (EFE).- A court set bail of $1 million for U.S. comedian Bill Cosby on Wednesday after charges were filed against him for allegedly sexually assaulting a woman in 2004. Cosby appeared briefly in a courtroom in Elkins Park, a suburb of Philadelphia, after the District Attorney's Office charged him with "aggravated" sexual assault. The actor, who had to...

Source: Flickr Commons San Juan, Dec 28 (EFE).- Three police, two of them women, were shot and killed Monday in Puerto Rico by a fellow officer during a heated argument at the Police Command in Ponce, a city on the south side of the Caribbean island. Police reported that Lieut. Luz Soto, Maj. Frank Roman and patrolwoman Rosario Hernandez were gunned down by Candelario Rivera, a fellow offic...

Pixabay Commons An internal page within the website of the Ministry of the Environment in Costa Rica (Spanish acronym: MINAE) was hacked by an Egyptian group claiming allegiance to the Cyber Caliphate, an extremist branch of ISIS. The Web page in question is a document that normally holds a compilation of events related to the history of Isla del Coco, a World Heritage Site that is part of ...

Source: Erica Hagan Memorial Fund Santiago, Dec 23 (EFE).- A court in the southern Chilean city of Temuco on Wednesday acquitted due to lack of evidence the only suspect in the murder of U.S. psychologist Erica Hagan, who was killed in early September 2014, court sources reported. Domingo Cofre Ferrada, 45, a security guard at the Bautista College in Temuco, where the 22-year-old victim liv...

Source: Flickr Commons A criminal division judge in the municipality of Carazo, located about 70 kilometers southwest of Managua, has named four suspects in the murder of Canadian expat Rajan Deedar Gill, who was found beaten to death in his country home near La Boquita in Nicaragua. According to a November 30th wire report by Agencia EFE, police officers found the victim next to Marbely de...

Wikimedia Commons The U.S. Embassy in San Jose reminds U.S. citizens that the holiday season in Costa Rica traditionally correlates with an increase in the frequency of property crimes.  Home invasions, robberies, burglaries, and thefts occur with greater regularity during the period between the end of October and the start of the new year.  The holiday season also tends to correlate with an i...

ZURICH: Eduardo Li, former head of the Costa Rica football federation, has decided to stop fighting a United States extradition application and accept a flight from Switzerland to face FIFAGate charges writes KEIR RADNEDGE, a respected author of several works on football and professional sports. Li had been just about to be admitted formally to the executive committee of world governing body FI...

Preferred weapon of guerrillas and drug cartels. San Jose, Dec 12 (EFE).- Costa Rica is seeing off 2015 as the most violent year in its history with at least 528 homicides to date, one more than the previous record established in 2010, according to figures released by the country's OIJ law enforcement agency. OIJ data indicate that 527 homicides were recorded in 2010, but since then the cou...

Source: VIDA Facebook An arrest has been made in the brutal murder of Sondra Lynn Elizondo, a 46-year old charity worker from the United States, who was found raped, stabbed and suffocated in a love hotel near the capital city of Costa Rica. According to a news report filed by Manuel Estrada of daily tabloid Diario Extra, detectives from the Office of Judicial Investigations (Spanish initia...

Source: Flickr Commons A woman from the United States was found dead in Barrio La California, a residential district located near Downtown San Jose, by housekeepers who suspect she may have been killed by her romantic partner. The incident, which took place earlier this week, was reported by metro reporter Manuel Estrada of daily tabloid Diario Extra. The victim has been identified by the l...