A retired Nicaraguan military officer and current critic of President Daniel Ortega was shot dead today in his home in Costa Rica, local authorities reported, quoted by the Associated Press and BTA.
The agency notes that Roberto Samkam, 67, has been living in exile in the neighboring country since July 2018, when paramilitary organizations attacked his home in Nicaragua.
Police reported that the attacker entered the housing complex inhabited by Samkam, located northeast of the Costa Rican capital San Jose, early in the morning, heading directly to the retired officer's home. Without saying a word, the man shot Samkam several times with a pistol and then fled, Costa Rican investigators said.
News of Samkam's murder spread quickly among the hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans who fled to Costa Rica after Ortega crushed mass protests against him in 2018.
Samkam worked as an expert for a Costa Rica-based organization that collected testimonies from victims of torture and other forms of government abuse. According to him, officials from Ortega's government were involved in the abuses. In 2022, the oppositionist published the book “Ortega: The Torture of Nicaragua“. Last year, he published another piece detailing how he watched Ortega build his dictatorship.
In January of last year, another exiled Nicaraguan opposition figure, Joao Maldonado, was shot seven times on a street near the Costa Rican capital. He survived and blamed a cell of the Sandinista National Liberation Front of Nicaragua for the attack, the AP recalls.