Homicides weren’t the only dark spot in Monday’s report. Thefts have more than doubled across Costa Rica in the last five years and car thefts were also slightly up over 2014.
Nicaraguan police presented a handcuffed Michael Adrián Salmerón Silva -- the principal suspect in the killing of five members of a family in Guanacaste, Costa Rica -- at a Saturday news conference.
The only child left unharmed in the brutal rampage was a 7-month-old infant that locals say was the child of Adrián Salmerón, the prime suspect in the weekend attack that left five dead and two injured.
Costa Rican authorities are investigating the grisly slaying of five members of the same family, including three children, who were discovered Tuesday morning inside their home in the northern Pacific community of Matapalo, in Guanacaste province. Two other minors were injured.
The trial of U.S. real estate investor Cyrus Sepehr, who is in preventive prison in Costa Rica with crippling post-polio syndrome, continued for a second straight week. On Friday, prosecutors asked judges that Sepehr be given 20 years in prison.
Costa Rica’s Prosecutor’s Office announced Monday that five people will go on trial for allegedly extracting and selling kidneys to buyers in Israel.
Arthur Budovsky, 42, the founder of the Costa Rica-based cyber-currency operation Liberty Reserve, pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiring to run a money laundering operation, the U.S. Department of Justice announced last Friday. He faces up to 20 years in prison.
U.S. citizen Cyrus Sepehr, who suffers from post-polio syndrome, says he's slowly dying in a Costa Rica prison while waiting on local courts to decide his legal fate.
In 2015 Costa Rica was the site of major drug busts, a first-of-its-kind sex tourism case and the rise of a serial killer. Here are the year's five biggest crime stories.
