Honduran soccer player Arnold Peralta was shot to death in a mall parking lot on Thursday (December 10) by unknown assailants as he entered a car, police said, ruling out robbery as a motive in the killing.
Peralta, a 26-year-old mid-fielder who played for Honduras’s most popular club Olimpia and who was on the national team, was shot by several men outside a shopping center in the port city of La Ceiba 115 miles (185 km) north of Tegucigalpa, police said.
“The player Peralta died after multiple gun shot wounds, injuries on his cranium, face, posterior thorax, anterior thorax. the cause of death, open cranial trauma, approximately 18 entrance and exit orifices, He’s been dead for one to two hours, approximately,” La Ceiba public ministry spokesperson Selvin Fernandez told media.
Fernandez said investigators were carefully combing the crime scene for evidence.
“Well this is the way we handle a high-impact crime as is the case with football player Peralta. We want to give the case promptness, we want things to be done properly, that’s why we’re doing things (the investigation) a bit slower, so that no stray bits are left behind, that’s the job we’re doing right now.”
Security ministry spokesman Leonel Sauceda said the assailants did not take any of Peralta’s personal belongings.
Sauceda said that additional investigators had been sent to La Ceiba to search for the attackers.
Peralta has previously played for the Scottish club Rangers.
The crime occurred in a region where drug cartels operate. Local gangs and drug traffickers are blamed for driving up Honduras’s murder rate to one of the highest in the world. (Reuters)