The investigation led by the Attorney General’s Office, allowed the prosecution of three people who would be involved in extortions that occurred in different incidents, in Villavicencio and municipalities in the south area of Meta
The people involved are: Carlos Andrés Arenas Varela, Juan Carlos Ríos Garzón and Johan Sebastián Canchón Fajardo. Prosecutors of Gaula charged them, according to their individual responsibilities, with extortion, attempted extortion and qualified theft, all aggravated.
They did not plead guilty to the charges, and prison sentences were pronounced by judges.
Arenas Varela was arrested in a public street in the south area of Villavicencio (Meta), when he received 200,000 pesos from a 15-year-old girl which were the product of extortion.
For his part, Ríos Garzón, apparently, asked farmers and ranchers from Fuentedeoro, San Juan de Arama and Granada (Meta) for money. The man claimed to be a member of the FARC dissidents to intimidate the victims.
The payments, allegedly, ranged between 3 and 30 million COP, in exchange for not being considered a military target.
Finally, Canchón Fajardo was arrested in flagrante delicto in the rural area of Puerto Lleras (Meta), where he was allegedly asking the owners of farms in the rural areas of Unión and Caribe in that municipality for money since November of this year. These men were arrested by officers of the Technical Investigative Corps (CTI) and Gaula of the National Army, in Villavicencio, Granada and Puerto Lleras (Meta).
The information contained in this press release corresponds to the narration of the objective news provided by the officials in charge of carrying out criminal investigations within the Office of the Attorney General. By the time this communication is disclosed, the legal status of the people mentioned is still pending to be resolved by the competent judicial authority, always under the presumption of innocence contemplated by Article 29 of the Political Constitution and Article 7 of Law 906 of 2004.