Carabineros, Chile's national police force, arrested seven Venezuelan nationals accused of belonging to the "Jauría del Parque de Los Reyes" (the "Parque de Los Reyes Pack"). According to police, the gang held pedestrians in that Santiago park and forced them to transfer the money in their bank accounts. Those arrested are five adults and two adolescents.
This was reported by La Tercera, which gathered statements from Carabineros and the Fiscalía Centro Norte, the public prosecutor's office for central-north Santiago. According to prosecutor Felipe Olivari, the investigation managed to prove nine robberies between May and August, all involving violence or intimidation and following the same modus operandi. BioBioChile, by contrast, refers to at least 11 victims, and G5noticias mentions ten complaints with the same pattern.
The operation was led by the Sección de Investigaciones Policiales (SIP), the police investigations unit of the Metropolitan Zone, and the Grupo de Operaciones Policiales Especiales (GOPE), the special police operations group. In the early hours of Tuesday, the teams raided eight properties. G5noticias reports that they were in Santiago, San Miguel and La Florida, and that judge Macarena Figueroa Ramírez authorized the entry warrants.
Lieutenant Colonel Arnaldo Carrasco, of the 3ª Comisaría Santiago Central (3rd Santiago Central Police Station), explained that the suspects approached the victims, "intimidated them and held them there for several minutes" in order to access their accounts from their own phones until they were emptied. He added that those who refused were assaulted.
According to G5noticias, the group operated with between six and ten people and used beatings, firearms and bladed weapons. Olivari said that one victim who was walking his dog was threatened that the animal would be stabbed. One man was held for more than half an hour and, because of his injuries, was unable to unlock his phone using facial recognition.
A key element of the investigation was the lifting of bank secrecy on the defendants' accounts at BancoEstado and BCI. The prosecutor said this allowed them to detect 55 transfers among the various defendants during the months of the robberies.
The assaults took place in a section of the park without security cameras, so no footage was recorded. "We always start from zero," said Olivari, who stressed the importance of the victims' complaints. Carrasco added that part of the group had already been arrested in July for theft by snatching.
At the arraignment hearing, the judge ordered pretrial detention for five of those arrested and provisional confinement for the two minors, according to G5noticias. The investigation made it possible to identify 13 members, including two adolescents aged 15 and 17, and Carabineros is still searching for the other six.
