He Ministry of Interior announced this Wednesday that it will ask the National Civil Service Office (ONSC) for the dismissal of four officials that they committed “very serious offenses” within the framework of the administrative investigation that started the portfolio in 2019 for the escape from Rocco Morabito.
Almost four years later, the ministry finished investigating the actions of a total of 28 officials. As announced at a press conference by Undersecretary Guillermo Maciel, of that total of 28 workers, 14 are exonerated of responsibility, 7 have minor misconduct, 3 serious and 4 very serious, which is grounds for dismissal.
“He is going to go to the ONSC for dismissal due to the irregularities found,” he explained. The people investigated fulfilled different roles, Maciel explained. “Supervision, coordination, those who were in charge of the highest hierarchies within the controls that should have been had and were not. No instructions were given, for example, to the guards on what they should do on the sixth floor where Morabito was,” explained the hierarch.
In addition to the four removal cases, the other sanctions will imply suspension for several days or up to six months.
The type of offenses they committed, Maciel pointed out, will be detailed when the resolutions and the notified officials are available.
Maciel, however, also pointed out that the lawyer who conducted the administrative investigation found other irregularities what were left “out of the investigation and the administrative summary”. “Irregular situations that were not contemplated in the summary,” said Maciel.
Among them the apparition in a cell on the sixth floor, which had torn off the grate, and was hanging a rope with knots and a harness; the manipulation of the video surveillance cameras on the sixth floor of the former Central Prison; and the footage where it is seen that Morabito moved the cameras so that his movements would not be recorded.
Maciel also recalled that three days before the escape occurred, on June 20, 2019, the Central Jail was left without a video surveillance system because it was withdrawn.
And he stressed that the flash drive given to Morabito by Mexican drug trafficker Gerardo González Valencia, who was going to visit the Italian at Cárcel Central. The device, Maciel recalled, was seized by the director of the Central Prison at the time, who sent it to the National Rehabilitation Institute (INR).
“That flash drive does not appear, we do not know what content it has, the fate it has had. That was not investigated either. All these events that are serious, really serious, are the ones that were left uninvestigated,” said the undersecretary.
Now the Ministry of the Interior opened an administrative investigation for each of these facts.
Asked about the knowledge of the Prosecutor’s Office about the facts verified by the Interior in the administrative investigation, Maciel said that all these situations “are already at the headquarters.”
“It is in parallel to the administrative investigation and the summary that the proceedings in the Prosecutor’s Office follow, which may or may not coincide,” he said.
“The Prosecutor’s Office works exclusively with the support of the Internal Affairs of the Police. And in that case we are outsiders, we do not participate in the Prosecutor’s case. There are the complaints made, a number of elements. We know that Lackner had made a lot of progress, he was close After completing the investigation, he had said at some point, we have faith that the Prosecutor’s Office as soon as possible to clarify to the public how the cocaine czar escaped, nothing more and nothing less than San José and Yi and he walked away and he took a taxi,” he criticized.
The case
The Italian mobster, leader of the Calabrian mafia ‘Ndrangheta, escaped from the former Central Prison, in the heart of Montevideo, on June 23, 2019, along with three other criminals.
He had been in prison in Uruguay since 2017, while his extradition to Italy was being processed, a country where he was one of the five most wanted men when he was found in a hotel in Montevideo, under the name of Francisco Capeletto.
After the escape in June 2019, Morabito was recaptured in May 2021 in the Brazilian city of Joa Pessoa. In July 2022 it was finally extradited to Italywhere he remains in prison.
The case of the escape was investigated for several years by the prosecutor for Economic and Complex Crimes, Ricardo Lackner, who in three years leading the case only got the indictment of a captain of the Republican Guardwhich was formalized in July 2022. The police officer was accused of repeated abuses of duties and was being investigated for arranging 12 transfers without a warrant of Gerardo González Valencia, a Mexican drug trafficker – member of Los Cuinis – who was also imprisoned in the Central Jail and what was it extradited to the United States.
