Four people have been arrested in Peru on suspicion of killing around 60 people to sell their fat on the blackmarket for cosmetic use in Europe, authorities say.
Three suspects who were arrested in central Peru this month have confessed to killing five people for their fat, according to Colonel Jorge Mejia, chief of Peru’s anti-kidnapping police.
A search is now underway for seven others, including two Italians, lead prosecutor Jorge Sans Quiroz said.
The fat was purchased “to be commercialised in European [cosmetic medicine] laboratories,” he said.
The prosecutor’s indictment said that the gang allegedly targeted farmers and indigenous people on remote Andean roads, tricking them by offering them jobs before killing them.
Colonel Mejia said that the suspects, two of whom were arrested carrying bottles of liquid fat, told police that it was worth $60,000 a gallon.
He said the suspects told police the fat was sold to intermediaries in Lima, Peru’s capital.
Police began making arrests after discovering a container with human fat that was being shipped to Lima from the Andean city of Huanuco, 250 miles (400 km) northeast of the capital, earlier this month.
At a news conference, police displayed two bottles of fat recovered from the suspects and a photograph of the rotting head of a 27-year-old male victim. Elmer Segundo Castillejos, one of the suspects, led police to the head, recovered in a coca-growing valley last month, Colonel Mejia said.
Mr Castillejos, 29, confessed that the gang would cut off its victims’ heads, arms and legs, remove the organs, then suspend the torsos from hooks above candles that warmed the flesh as the fat dripped into tubs below, he added.
Mr Castillejos also allegedly told police that the band’s fugitive leader, 56-year-old Hilario Cudena, has been killing to extract fat from victims for more than three decades.
Human fat is often used for anti-wrinkle treatments, although it is almost always extracted from the patient’s own buttocks or stomach.
At least 60 people are listed as missing in Huanuco province, where the gang allegedly operated, this year alone.
Mr Mejia said that police received a tip four months ago that human fat from the jungle was being sold in Lima. In August, he said, police infiltrated the band and later obtained some of the viscous fluid, which a police laboratory confirmed as human fat.
Two weeks ago police arrested Serapio Marcos Veramendi and Enedina Estela who were carrying a soda bottle full of human fat as they sat in a Lima bus station. Their testimony led to the arrest of Mr Castillejos three days later at the same bus station.
The three are charged with homicide, criminal conspiracy, illegal firearms possession and drug trafficking, according to a statement from the Lima Superior Court. Police said that they were searching for the alleged buyer.
Police named the band the “Pishtacos” after a Peruvian myth dating to pre-Columbian times of white men who killed to extract human fat, using it to make soaps and beauty creams out of the tissue.
Despite police claims, cosmetic experts expressed doubt that there could be an international market in human fat.
“There would be a risk of immunological reaction that could lead to life-threatening consequences if fat from someone else were used,” said Dr Neil Sadick, professor of dermatology at Cornell Weill Medical College in New York.
Dr Adam Katz, a professor of plastic surgery at the University of Virginia medical school, said; “I can’t see why there would be a black market for fat. In most countries we can get fat so readily and in such amounts from people who are willing and ready to donate that I don’t see why there would ever be a black market for fat, of all tissues.”
Great pic! You know there is another way to look at this. One, the world is overpopulated, so they are helping to save the earth. Two, fat people cost more when it comes to health care, so they are saving their country money. Besides, what would people here in LA do without their cosmetics?