Eight individuals involved in the kidnapping for ransom followed by the murder of Gastón Tallone, the Entre Ríos port entrepreneur killed in July 2024, will stand trial following a request from the head of the Federal Criminal and Correctional Prosecutor's Office No. 4, Carlos Stornelli. This is a case in which the victim's remains have not yet been found, but there is abundant evidence to determine the responsibility of the accused for the kidnapping and murder of the entrepreneur that occurred in July 2024 in the Abasto area of Buenos Aires, as reported by the Noticias Argentina agency based on information from the Fiscales portal. In the request, the prosecutor stated that the accused will face an oral trial: lawyer José Alberto Tomás Uriburu, as the alleged mastermind; Gustavo Adolfo Juliá, with a known record of having served a 13-year prison sentence in Spain for trafficking 944 kilos of cocaine in the so-called 'narcojet' case; Alejandro Nicolás Ficcadenti; Sergio Gabriel Di Vanni; Juan Mauricio Zabaleta; Cristian Mariano Gauna; Juan Carlos Miró; and L.G.L. (who testified as a collaborator). In mid-October of this year, Chamber I of the Federal Criminal and Correctional Court confirmed the pretrial detention for all the accused for the crimes of aggravated kidnapping for ransom, carried out with the participation of three or more people and resulting in the intentional murder of the victim, which carries a life sentence. The case began in mid-July 2024 following a complaint from the Federal Prosecutor's Office of Concepción del Uruguay, led by Federal Prosecutor Josefina Minatta. At that time, Tallone was being investigated in a money laundering case, and the prosecutor reported that wiretaps were detected indicating his kidnapping. The investigation began in that jurisdiction, but later, after it was confirmed that the crime occurred in the Federal Capital, it was transferred to Stornelli's federal prosecutor's office in Buenos Aires. According to the prosecution's accusation, the kidnapping occurred on July 8, 2024, when the accused Miró and Gauna, under Uriburu's orders, 'transferred Tallone from Anchorena Street at 400 in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires to a property located at the intersection of Chaco and Libertad streets in the Buenos Aires locality of Benavídez, which served as a place of captivity'. Once on the property, belonging to the lawyer's family, the captors forced Tallone to manage the money for his release. The ransom payment of $65,000 was made at night at a gas station in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Núñez, but investigators maintain that despite receiving the money, the captors murdered Tallone and even tried to get more money by sending extortionate messages to the victim's son. The prosecutor stated that 'the collected elements point to Tallone being kidnapped in the context of a conflict with Uriburu, subsequently murdered, and his body hidden through extreme methods'. He also added that the testimony of one of the accused was key, as he recounted that during a conversation with another accused, the latter allegedly stated that 'Uriburu went crazy and killed the businessman with a shovel, and that they took him near Campana, Buenos Aires province, where they dumped him by the side of the road and set him on fire. I think it was them two because he told me so, he said: 'we set him on fire'.
