Dahud Hanid Ortiz: The murderer who slipped among the prisoners exchanged with Venezuela is released after his repatriation to the United States | News from Madrid

Dahud Hanid Ortiz, an American citizen repatriated from Venezuela as part of a three -band prisoner with El Salvador, was lost his track last week, when he landed in Texas aboard a flight chartered by the administration of Donald Trump. Blandía a flag with the barriers and stars, and exhibited a wide smile, mixed between the rest of the group members: nine other prisoners returned thanks to the efforts of the State Department, which sold that “return home” as the long -awaited return of some “political prisoners.” The truth is that Ortiz served in Venezuela for the brutal murder in 2016 of three people in the Usera neighborhood, in Madrid.

This Thursday, The Washington Post revealed citing an anonymous source that the criminal continues in the United States and is released. That source implies that “nobody was following her track” and that is why they do not know about their whereabouts. It was not the first time that Ortiz, who was Marine for 17 years and served in Iraq, where he was awarded by his heroism before they expelled him from the body, tried to sneak into an exchange of prisoners with the United States.

In the group in which there were tourists that activists in defense of democracy in Venezuela denounce that the regime of Nicolás Maduro uses as currency. Ortiz had more than six years and nine months between bars, after his arrest of a crime of wide media echo in Spain, where he is known as “the Usera murderer.”

The State Department did not immediately answer the confirmation request of El País sent Thursday night (Washington time).

The previous day, a spokesman responded in an email that with the exchange, which made it possible to return to his country of 252 Venezuelan prisoners deported by Washington to El Salvador, where they were imprisoned, the United States had “achieved the release of all its citizens arrested in Venezuela, many of which denounced having been submitted to torture and other hard conditions”. He also argued that “for privacy reasons” would not go into “details of any specific case.”

An employee of the Department of Justice said he referred on Thursday to the State when this newspaper asked about Ortiz’s whereabouts.

The night before, the Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello told in his weekly program, With the deck giving, that the Venezuelan authorities had warned US officials who traveled to Caracas that they were taking a convict murderer. “We know what was there, I even said at the airport that they were asking for a murderer. They take a convicted murderer,” Cabello explained.

It remains to listen to the official version of Washington, and how Trump’s administration, which has been embarked on a brutal campaign against irregular immigration, justifying it in the need to expel the worst criminals, an operation like this, which has ended the author of a back of the back at home, has been able to explain months.

Expelled from the Marines

As stated in judicial documents consulted by the country, Lieutenant Ortiz, who at that time lived in the American Schweinfurt base, east of Frankfurt, where he married Irina Trippel, was expelled in 2015 from the Marines for “fraudulent behavior, official false statement and theft.” A military court found him guilty of those crimes when he was discovered by posing as a neighbor of New York to claim aid. “The defendant presented documentation using a fictitious address to receive the basic housing subsidy at the price that would correspond to him (in that city), which is greater than the one that Fort Lee touched in (Virginia)” can be read in the sentence.

The following year, Ortiz, 54, perpetrated in Madrid and spite the massacre for which he was sentenced in Venezuela. In June 2016, he traveled to Spain in a car lent by his mother -in -law. He made him poisoned by the jealousy he felt for his ex -wife’s new relationship with a lawyer named Víctor Salas, 36, head of an office in the Spanish capital.

On Wednesday, June 22, at about 14.30, he arrived at the Salas Firm, but did not find it there. A few hours after, he had murdered two of the rooms of Salas, Elisa Consuegra Gálvez, 31, and Maritza Osorio Riverón, 51; Already a client who went to collect some papers, the taxi driver Pepe Castillo Vega, 42. Apparently, he thought that unfortunate was the man he was looking for. Then, he set fire to the office, and fled.

Salas was saved because that morning was in the courts of the Plaza de Castilla, in northern Madrid. Also, because, as he explained to this newspaper this week, he decided to take a nap.

Ortiz reappeared on Thursday 23 in Germany. Trippel had no doubt that he had committed crime. The 41st Court of Instruction of the controversial judge Juan Carlos Peinado was in charge of the case, but did not set at the beginning in Ortiz. This was time to take a plane from Germany to Venezuela, before an international arrest warrant was issued, exactly one year after he committed his horrific crimes.

There, he lived with his family in Puerto Ordaz. In 2018, he was arrested and Caracas denied the extradition application of Spain. In January 2024, he was accused of “qualified intentional homicide executed with alevosía and for a futile motive in the degree of author.” The appeals of their lawyers did not serve to get their release.

A year and a half later, in what seems like a diplomatic carambola, an mess phenomenal or, directly, a fudge, Ortiz achieved last week what he intended. Meanwhile, Salas has been alerting that a dangerous man, who defined himself in a letter sent after the murders such as “a horrible human being,” is loose.