was filed (22 October 1996), the only result had been the conviction of one of the suspects. Moreover, none of the persons guilty of intimidating the victim’s parents and wife and their lawyers had been identified. 34. The irregularities they refer to include the following: (1) the Court of the Justice of the Peace took charge of the case immediately but did little to cast light on the incident; (2) the Prosecutor’s Office was also negligent throughout the entire investigation process; (3) a bullet found in the car that took Ramón Mauricio García-Prieto Giralt to hospital was handed over to the police by a neighbor, but no official record of it exists and the bullet has disappeared; (4) on 25 July 1994, the Department for the Investigation of Organized Crime (DICO) was told by the court that a bullet had been extracted from the victim’s body and was at that time in the forensic laboratory; however, no further mention is made of it in the case documents; (5) no report was requested to determine the type and caliber of the weapon used; (6) on every occasion when Mr. García-Prieto Sr. went to the DICO to find out about his son’s death, Sgt. Romero Alfaro, alias "Zaldaña," attended to him, voluntarily, and not the officer assigned to the investigation, and he was invariably given inaccurate information; (7) when Argueta Rivas was arrested, cards used by the Salvadorian armed forces were confiscated from him; these cards then disappeared from the court for a period of time before reappearing, but it is impossible to determine whether they are the same ones that were confiscated from the accused. 35. In turn, the Salvadorian State has made no objection asserting the nonexhaustion of domestic remedies, 10 nor has it specified the remedies still available to the petitioner. Instead, it maintains that the procedural steps required by law have been effectively followed, and lists those steps. It also reports that one of the guilty is serving a 30-year prison sentence for the murder of Ramón Mauricio García Prieto-Giralt under a ruling handed down by the Fifth Criminal Court of San Salvador 11 and that another, Julio Ismael Díaz Ortiz, was recently arrested and is in preventive custody. The State does not deny that the third alleged participant in the crime, Sgt. Carlos Romero Alfaro (alias "Zaldaña") has not yet been indicted, but it reports that he is under investigation. 36. The Commission holds that an objection asserting the nonexhaustion of domestic remedies can be waived either expressly or by implication 12 and that it must be expressly brought 13 at an early stage in the proceedings. Otherwise, the Commission may deem it to be implicitly waived. 14 37. As has been said above, the State has made no such objection in the case at hand. The Commission therefore concludes that the State has implicitly waived the objection and deems the requirement set forth in Article 46(1)(a) to have been met. 38. In any event, the Commission believes that mention should be made of the petitioners’ arguments regarding the ineffectiveness of the domestic remedies and the delays in the investigation which, in their opinion, should release them from compliance with the rule requiring the exhaustion of said remedies. At this stage in the proceedings, when the admissibility of the petition is the issue, the Commission only addresses summarily the question of the effectiveness of the domestic remedies and the delays in the investigation, since it will be analyzed in greater depth in connection with Articles 8 and 25 of the Convention and their observance when the Commission rules on the merits of the case. 10 See Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Velásquez Rodríguez Case, Preliminary Objections, Judgment of 26 June 1987, paragraph 88. 11 See page 690. 12 Inter-Am.Ct.H.R., Velásquez Rodríguez Case, Preliminary Objections, op. cit., paragraph 10. 13 Inter-Am.Ct.H.R., Castillo Páez Case, Preliminary Objections, Judgment of 30 January 1996, Series C, No. 24, paragraph 41. 14 Inter-Am.Ct.H.R., Velásquez Rodríguez Case, Preliminary Objections, op. cit., paragraph 88. 5