national

Park official denies blame

CARLOS LEMOS/LA PRENSA

on her honor: Parque Omar Administrator Mingthoy Giro (left) points to the warehouse where a state statue was kept before it went missing. She has denied any wrongdoing in the case.1100416

Parque Omar Administrator Mingthoy Giro presented a statement yesterday before the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, responding to allegations that she may be involved in the disappearance of the “Juegos de Antaño” monument, which was mysteriously removed from a warehouse within the park.

In the statement, Giro announced that she is ready to talk with investigators and would acquiesce to a lie detector test to prove that she had no part in the theft of the 42-piece sculpture.

The park administrator said she had appeared at the office of Prosecutor Ransés Barrera on a voluntary basis to clarify that she was unaware that the monument had gone missing from a warehouse that, as she explained, is located a distance of 100 meters from the park headquarters of the Sistema de Protección Institucional ( SPI), the government agency responsible for providing security to public facilities.

According to Giro, in August 2006 the Dirección de Patrimonio Histórico had asked her to transfer the assorted pieces of the monument from the former Museo del Niño y la Niña to Parque Omar, where they would be temporarily assigned to the Despacho de la Primera Dama.

Giro alleged that she had never physically received the bronze figures or an official receipt of their transfer, but that everything was arranged through correspondence.

Audits of park assets conducted in 2006 and 2007 included items being stored in warehouses on park premises, said Giro, but that inventories never mentioned the monument because it did not officially belong to the Despacho de la Primera Dama.

As written in the statement, Giro claimed that she learned of the sculptures’ disappearance one morning in May, after TV-2 newscaster Lucy Molinar had exposed the apparent theft.

Following an internal investigation into the matter, Giro said one of her subordinates notified her that the report was untrue.

Then, toward the end of August, fellow administrator Marisol Quijano reportedly told Giro that the bronze figures were no longer in the park warehouse, after which she proceeded to sound the alert, notifying the SPI and the Dirección de Investigación Judicial (DIJ). Finally, in September, the Ministerio de la Presidencia filed a formal crime report with Ministerio Público.

Giro said that the thieves must have known exactly where the pieces were located, because most of the statues were in the first of two warehouses in the park, where they were somewhat obstructed from view behind a pile of objects. She also noted that the robbers took off with the statues, but neither disrupted or stole any other items within the storage unit.