Alleged sexual abuser escaped in Medellin

Andrés Felipe Zapara Castrillón, 33 years old, accused of being a sexual predator, escaped from the authorities while he was being treated at the La María Hospital in Medellín. According to what was reported, the Police and the Prosecutor's Office are carrying out an operation to recapture him. The subject was captured on March 15 by the CTI of the Prosecutor's Office, in his name, there are 12 complaints from women who accuse him of having sexually abused them. The man, according to the file, intimidated them with bladed weapons and then violently accessed them.

The Director of Prosecutors in Medellín, Natalia Rendón, commented that “apparently, the alleged sexual predator approached the victims and identified himself as an alleged member of a criminal gang. After threatening them with a stab, he drove them to hotels, where he carnally accessed them and then stole their belongings.”

The sexual assaults that the man would have committed occurred between December 2020 and December 2021, and his victims, the 12 women, are between 17 and 34 years old. “Police work, including the inspection of security cameras, highlighted the moments when, apparently, the defendant would commit the aforementioned crimes in sectors such as the center of Medellín, the Stadium, the Botanical Garden, and the La Floresta neighborhoods, Caribbean, among others,” the Prosecutor's Office stressed on March 15.

The man, authorities say, identified himself as a member of the band “Las Convivir del Centro”. When he was arrested, the uniformed men in charge of the case recall, the man was wounded in his left hand, so he was taken to hospital. While he was in the care center, he asked to go to the bathroom and, in the midst of caregivers, he went through one of the windows of the space he was in.

“The procedures for the capture of Zapata Castrillón were followed by the National Police on February 27 when, it is believed, it was intimidating a girl under 15 years of age. The victim's cries for help made it possible to capture the alleged perpetrator. As part of the investigation, the defendant was reportedly identified by 12 victims as his aggressor,” the prosecutor added to his capture. At the time of the hearings, the man, the Prosecutor's Office details, did not accept any of the charges.

According to the document on Sexual Crimes to Minors in Colombia: Sex Education as the Main Tool, approximately 43,993 complaints associated with sexual crimes were filed in Colombia by 2021. Of those cases, 85.4% were women. According to figures from the Attorney General's Office, consulted by La Javeriana investigators for their project within the Laboratory for the Economics of Education, 27,000 of the complaints, that is, 61%, pertain to cases of sexual violence against children and adolescents. In 2021, according to Legal Medicine, 17,534 cases of sexual violence in children were reported in 2021.

On average, the research says, abuse against a minor is reported every 20 minutes. The same study highlights that 69.7 per cent of schools in the country have not trained teachers on issues of sex education. “Unfortunately there are still many officials of educational and justice institutions who do not believe boys and girls (...) When they approach an adult or a teacher to tell them something that bothers them, and with whom they feel uncomfortable, they must be believed because children are not really going to invent a situation like this,” said Angelica Cuenca, executive secretary of the Alliance for Colombian Childhood, in testimonies collected by El País.

KEEP READING: