Judge Carol Patricia Flores sent the doctor, the anesthesiologist and two nurses to preventive detention, at the request of the Prosecutor’s Office, for kidnapping and hindering criminal proceedings, accused of the disappearance of Floridalma Roque, a Honduran woman who traveled from New York to Guatemala to undergo a cosmetic surgery operation on June 13 and who, since then, has been missing after never having left the Perfectima Body clinic, located in the wealthy zone 14 of the capital.
They are the doctor and director of the clinic, Kevin Malouf, relative of Antonio Malouf, former Minister of Economy of this Central American country between January 2020 and March 2022, the anesthesiologist Lidia Viviana Silva and the nurses Luis Alberto Castro and Susana Rojas, who were arrested on Friday of last week in the framework of an investigation led by the Femicide Prosecutor’s Office.
Floridalma Roque went to the clinic on June 13 to undergo a surgical procedure for facial rejuvenation and liposuction of the arms. She arrived accompanied by a relative who promised to pick her up the next day at ten in the morning when she was discharged, although when she arrived, Dr. Malouf informed her that the woman had already left three hours before leaving. the clinic after requesting a vehicle through the inDrive app. Since then, they have not heard from her nor has she given any signs of her life, so the family filed a complaint with the Public Ministry, which activated an Isabel Claudina Alert, which is in charge of searching for the missing women.
During the judicial hearing, the Femicide prosecutor showed frames in which the nurse Luis Alberto Castro can be seen taking a woman in a wheelchair to a vehicle on June 14, where he got into with his head bandaged and with his clothes on. with which Floridalma arrived at the clinic the day before. Behind that vehicle was another black one, owned by Kevin Malouf, who followed it at all times until in an area of ??the capital the woman got out of the inDrive and got into the doctor’s car.
The judge endorsed the prosecutor’s thesis, according to which the nurse Susana Rojas impersonated Floridalma Roque, posing as her so that the video surveillance cameras could capture the moment in which the patient supposedly left the clinic in a wheelchair and boarded a vehicle. To do this, there are several means of investigation that demonstrate it, such as the fact that the inDrive was requested from the phone and the nurse’s application, while the signal from her mobile device was also detected in the area where she got on the Kevin Malouf’s vehicle. Likewise, the doctor’s phone signal was also in the same place where the alleged victim got out of the taxi and boarded Malouf’s car.
Minutes later, the doctor returned alone to his clinic and, later, the nurse Susana Rojas arrived, who had not been captured by any camera when she left the building where the medical center is located, so everything indicates that It was about the woman who was taken out in a wheelchair and who posed as the patient who has disappeared today.
The judge stressed that, with the investigative means presented by the Prosecutor’s Office, it can be established that “until today, the whereabouts of Floridalma Roque are really unknown, for which reason that protected legal right of freedom of locomotion was violated ” . Thus, he indicated, “it is not really known what happened to her after arriving for a surgical procedure”, despite the fact that the people imprisoned today declared before the Prosecutor’s Office that Mrs. Roque “had left” after sleeping one night in the clinic , after there had been no complications in the operation.
However, the Prosecutor’s Office reproduced an audio of a telephone call from Dr. Malouf to Medical Alert requesting their urgent help, since, as he informed them, there was a “post-operated” patient who is suffering from “brachycardia of hell. Please come quickly,” he asked them, although they never arrived, since it is a private health care service to which Malouf was not registered. Likewise, another audio was played in which the surgeon called the Meykos pharmacy to request the anticoagulant medicine Heparin, although they replied that they only had it in gel, for which he rejected it since he wanted it to be injected.
Another of the means of investigation that the Prosecutor’s Office has are some frames in which Dr. Malouf is observed transporting a kind of plastic barrel that reached almost to his waist and that he used to throw away biological waste. Currently, it is unknown where that barrel is and what it contained inside when the surgeon took it away. In those same images, the nurse Luis Alfredo Castro is seen carrying some bags, the content of which is also unknown. The judge stressed that right now “we are not judging Roque’s death, but rather that said person has not been located after entering the clinic on June 13, so “up to now, the only thing we know is that he may supposedly be deprived of liberty”.
The Prosecutor’s Office also showed as a means of investigation the electronic withdrawal of 950,000 quetzales (118,000 euros) by Dr. Malouf, days after a telephone call was intercepted between the sister of the nurse Susana Rojas and her mother in which she warned her of that the surgeon had planned to escape and had offered money to the other three involved to defend themselves and “see what they do” with the problem.
For her part, the doctor’s lawyer compared the entire Prosecutor’s investigation to a “novel” and revealed that, at the time of the surgery on Floridalma Roque, the anesthesiologist Lidia Viviana Silva suffered severe abdominal pain, a consequence of which the doctor The nurse gave her fentanyl after the operation was over, which kept her sedated until the next day.
He went further by pointing out that Malouf’s phone calls to the Meykos pharmacy and to Alert Médica were not related to any medical complication of the patient, but rather to the anesthesiologist’s state of health, given that, despite having been injected with fentanyl , “she was grimacing in pain which could have indicated bowel perforation.” This argument fell minutes later when the Prosecutor’s Office reproduced the surgeon’s call to Medical Alert in which he specified that he had a problem with a ‘post-operated’ patient, thus ruling out that it was the anesthesiologist.
The judge reminded the lawyer that this “is not a novel issue” and told her that Floridalma’s relatives “deserve respect”, because the investigative media “reveal that this person is deprived of his freedom and is very The communication that incriminates Malouf in the sense that he wants to give money” to the other three people involved and that “he is going to leave the country” is important. From now on, the Prosecutor’s Office has two months to investigate and on October 16 the Intermediate Stage Hearing will be held in which the judge will decide whether or not to send the four accused of the disappearance of Floridalma to an oral and public debate.
During the hearing this Friday, the victim’s eldest son, José Roque, recalled that the family had not known his mother’s whereabouts for 52 “horrible” days: “We know that she entered that clinic and never left.” For this reason, he said that “it is not possible that these people to whom she entrusted her life disappear and pay us in this way”, so he stressed that she does not want this to go “unpunished”. Finally, he assured that “in one way or another we want our mother to appear in order to heal this pain that we have.”
Floridalma’s sister, Ercy Parachico, also took the floor, who through tears addressed the nurse and anesthesiologist directly, looking at their faces: “we hope that you who are women and, if you have children and a mother, speak, because we as a family want know where it is.”
One of the family’s hypotheses is that the woman died during the surgical intervention, taking into account the background of Dr. Malouf, who is facing two other investigations by the Prosecutor for Crimes Against Life. The first for the crime of culpable homicide after the death of a 25-year-old girl during a cosmetic surgery operation at the same clinic, while the second is for the crime of culpable injuries after performing an aesthetic procedure on a man who reported it. in 2019 for having left a bad leg.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project