Senator Celeste Gomez (Santiago Rodriguez-PRD) says that Friday’s murder of 61-year-old Carlos Enrique Everstz Fournier clearly indicates there were sinister forces at play in the death of her brother, the late senator Dario Gomez.
“The death of Carlos Everstz is evidence that behind the killing of Dario there are intellectual authors and the information he held is key to solving the crime? If this were not true, he would not have been killed,” said Gomez.
On 28 June 2002, Everstz Fournier appeared on a TV program and alleged the complicity of high-ranking military officers in the murder of the senator. He named former police chief of homicide, General Rafael Oscar Bencosme Candelier, who he said offered him RD$1 million and an instatement to the police force as a major if he accepted the job of murdering Dario Gomez. Everstz declared that Bencosme was chief of the paramilitary group, Grupo Cobra, created to carry out covert work for the police. During the TV interview, Everstz said his life was being threatened and several others with key information were also in danger of being silenced. Evertsz said the Grupo Cobra was the invention of an army soldier, a nephew of Colonel Espiritusanto, a university student (Carlos Rodriguez) and two other civilians he identified as Raul Martinez Acosta and a woman named Elizabeth.
So far, his predictions have been coming true. The first victim was Carlos Rodriguez, who was shot in the head near Avenida Espana, although authorities claimed it was a suicide.
One of those arrested by the police and accused of murdering the senator, Carlos Manuel Geronimo Alfonseca (Collares), was killed during a supposed fight in the Monte Plata jail where he was being held. His assassin was Liborio Hernandez, a man serving a 30-year sentence for killing his pregnant wife. Alfonseca’s death occurred shortly after another of the five the police had accused of the homicide, Domingo Daniel Minaya, claimed his life was in jeopardy.
The government sent Collares, Minaya, Ernesto Melendez Vasquez (El Chino), Ramon Antonio Rosario Taveras (El Gringo) and Pedro Urbano Pina (Kelly) to jail for Gomez’ murder.
After having been released from jail less than a year ago, Everstz was shot to death by a passing motorcycle rider in Santiago, as he waited for the bus on his way to his security job in a Puerto Plata free zone.
Last week, El Nacional newspaper published an account that Everstz had repeated on a TV program that he would be murdered and that he had plans to seek asylum at an embassy.
The police appointed Colonel Esteban Roa Castillo, deputy director of investigations criminal, and Major Amin Tejada Vantroi, homicide inspector, to investigate the murder.
Everstz worked for many years as an intelligence agent for the army and had bragged of killing 30 to 40 men and women during his career as a secret agent. The son of a Dutch father and a mother of US citizenship, he is also linked to the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar during the Trujillo dictatorship and the Central Intelligence Agency of the USA and trained in Virginia and Panama. On 3 July 2002, the National Drug Control Department (DNCD) acknowledged in a press release that Everstz was on their payroll as an informant, according to a report in El Caribe newspaper.