The Panamanian justice condemned the Dominican Gilberto Ventura Ceballos to fifty years in prison for murdering five young university students in that country.
Ventura, a 42-year-old dangerous international criminal, took refuge in Costa Rica for several months after escaping from a Panamanian prison. He was arrested in Jacó in September 2017, in a joint operation between the Judicial Investigation Agency (OIJ), the Panama Police, and Interpol.
The sentence against Ventura Ceballos was handed down on Monday by the Second Superior Court of Panama. The Dominican Alcibiades Méndez was also sentenced. This was confirmed by the Judicial Branch of that country through a tweet.
Ventura Ceballos and his accomplice assassinated the victims -of Chinese descent- between 2010 and 2011 in the city of La Chorrera in exchange for $243 thousand (more than 120 million colones). Apparently, they wanted to kidnap and extort the family of young people because they were prosperous merchants in that area.
The victims were identified as: Yessenia Argelis Loo Kam, Yong Jian Wu, Samy Zeng Chen, Joel Maurio Liu Wong, and Georgina del Carmen Lee Chen. After the crimes, Ventura Ceballos fled to his native Dominican Republic. There he was arrested in November 2011. Then, he was extradited to Panama, where he was serving pretrial arrest since the end of 2012.
However, on December 28th, 2016, he escaped from La Joyita prison, located 37 kilometers from the Panamanian capital. To achieve this, he had the help of five prison guards. It is believed that from that moment he had everything ready to get to Costa Rica.
The National Police of Panama described the suspect as a man ‘highly dangerous to any society’. In Costa Rica he used a false Colombian identity: he pretended to be an entrepreneur and erased his fingerprints since 2011 to avoid being tracked.