Word: gang
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...existence of marauding fat stealers was made public mid-November by General Felix Murga, head of the national police's criminal-investigation division, and Colonel Jorge Mejia, who leads the antikidnapping unit. The Murga-Mejia team said the gang may have killed dozens of people over the past three decades and showed off two dirty bottles containing a yellowish goop they said was human fat that had been harvested for sale to European buyers in the cosmetics business. Three people have been arrested and the search continues for at least six other fat removers. (See the top 10 unsolved crimes...
...police dubbed the gang the pishtacos, based on colonial folklore of a tall, white male who wears a broad-rimmed hat and roams the highlands, stealing the fat - and sometimes the eyes - of unsuspecting travelers. The pishtaco is equivalent to Bigfoot in the U.S. northwest or the chupacabra in the southwest. Everyone has a tale, but the creature remains elusive. (See the 25 crimes of the century...
Luna scoffed at the police's description of the gang beheading its victims, hanging the corpses upside down and coaxing out the fat with votive candles similar to those lit in Catholic churches to ask saints for favors. The police investigation included an artist's depiction of this fat-harvesting process - a scientific impossibility...
...detailed the supposed operation of a death squad within the police unit in the northern city of Trujillo. He documented 46 criminals shot to death by police officers in 2007 and 2008 in the city, which has a population hovering around 800,000. But the allegations of the pishtaco gang surfaced at about the time Uceda's article was going to press. For several days, the murderous fat stealers hogged the headlines...
Update: On Dec. 1, the head of the national police put General Felix Murga on leave. It was Murga who made the announcement of the existence of the fat-stealing gang in mid-November. Interior Minister Octavio Salazar told reporters that he could not say if such a band of criminals existed...