[ad_1]
WORLD |
13/07/2018
11:40
Óscar Muñoz Toledo, who was arrested Thursday in Santiago, will remain in jail while the 180-day investigation ordered by the judge is under way to determine whether he committed the crimes for which he was charged on Friday. EFE / Archivo (Photo: EFE )
<! –
->
Santiago, Chile, July 13 (EFE) – The Court of Guarantee of the city of Rancagua has decreed today preventive prison for the excommunication of the archbishop of Santiago de Chile, the priest Óscar Muñoz Toledo, imputed by the alleged commission of repeated sex abuse and rape, according to the judiciary.
Muñoz, who was arrested Thursday in Santiago, will remain in jail while the 180-day investigation ordered by the judge is under way to determine whether he committed the crimes for which he was charged on Friday.
The accused, 56, has himself a charge of seven cases of sexual abuse and rape on minors, which is why the prosecutor of the region of O. Higgins, led by the prosecutor Emiliano Arias, ordered his arrest yesterday.
Muñoz was transferred early today to Rancagua, about 90 kilometers south of Santiago, where he appeared in court to witness his formalization.
Muñoz, who was also pastor of the Church of Jesus of Nazareth in the area of Santiago de Estación Central, had made denunciations before the Office of the Ministry of Complaints and had been separated from his post last January, two weeks before the visit to Chile. Dad Francisco.
Last May, the Prosecutor opened an investigation against him after revealing the facts that would have affected four children, but to date, there have been seven cases between 2002 and the beginning of this year.
The victims were between 11 and 17 years old; five mistreated minors are religious nephews, another is one of their acolytes and the rest is a young man who was abused in Rancagua in 2004.
It should be noted that Muñoz was responsible for receiving complaints in the Archdiocese of Santiago about sexual abuse cases in the church and was also a direct advisor to Cardinal Ricardo Ezzati, head of the # 39; Archdiocese.
Asked about the situation, Ezzati assured reporters that the church "has the readiness to collaborate with the courts in all that is needed".
Prosecutor Emiliano Arias, in charge of the case, said Thursday that despite the old data of some of the facts, the crimes allegedly committed by Muñoz are not prescribed, and has not ruled out an increase in the number of victims.
He added that any possible concealment of the crimes are also examined. "It is a corrector who, knowing later the commission of a crime, facilitates the task of not being discovered, and this hypothesis is being investigated in this case," he said. he said.
In June, the Office of the Prosecutor ordered the seizure of documents and computers in the bishopric of the city of Rancagua and in the Ecclesiastical Court of Santiago.
This diligence sought to find canonical records, previous inquiries and background information relating to the allegations that designated a group of priests from the area of O. Higgins and which included a fraternity of abusers called "The Familia", in which case fourteen priests were suspended.
Two other regional prosecutors, Raúl Guzmán, from the Office of the Prosecutor of the Southern Metropolis, and Mauricio Richards, from the Maule region, are currently conducting investigations involving Catholic clerics.
Cases of sexual abuse have shaken the Chilean Catholic Church for years and last June, Pope Francis accepted the resignation of five bishops, after 34 members of the Chilean Bishops' Conference offered their post after to have been summoned to the Vatican for the pontiff.
Juan Barros and Horacio Valenzuela were directly accused of having concealed the abuses committed on minors by the victims of the parish priest Fernando Karadima, a case in which the pope had to change his position after having initially argued that the charges the bishops were slanderers
EFE
[ad_2]
Source link
