37 1 Irregularities concerning evidence 76(23) On July 3, 1993, the survivors of the events handed an empty cartridge case, and a bullet head they had found in the microbus in which Jorge Carpio Nicolle was traveling, to Military Base No. 20, posted in El Quiché. Nevertheless, these elements were not sent to the Identification Unit of the National Police Directorate General. 76(24) On July 4, 1993, the police searched the site of the facts and found three bullet heads and one cloth backpack with clothes and nine rounds of assorted caliber. All of this was sent to the Identification Unit of the National Police Directorate General. In official communication No. 394 of August 13, 1993, Police Commissioner Alejandro García Mejía provided information on this evidence and forwarded it to the magistrate of Chichicastenango; but it was never incorporated into the case file. 76(25) On July 7, 1993, an expert evaluation was carried out on the nine rounds and three bullet heads of assorted caliber found near the site of the facts. On October 17, 1995, copies of the original official communications had to be sent, because the original report on this expert evaluation had been lost. 76(26) Oscar Abel García Arroyo, ballistics expert, examined the firearm confiscated from Juan Acabal Patzán and concluded that this weapon was the one that had fired the rounds that produced the empty cartridges found at the site of the facts. On May 25, 1994, this expert sent his evaluation report to the Fifth Criminal Court of First Instance, and testified on it before the judicial authority on April 22, 1997. However, the weapon confiscated from Juan Acabal Patzán was taken out of Guatemala without any authorization or judicial order. In this way, the chain of custody of this evidence was broken.28 76(27) The autopsies carried out on the corpses of Jorge Carpio Nicolle, Juan Vicente Villacorta Fajardo, Alejandro Ávila Guzmán and Rigoberto Rivas González were mislaid for about a year. 76(28) On July 7, 1993, the National Police spokesman, Darwin de León Palencia, had a car accident when traveling to San Pedro de Chichicastenango, during which various elements collected from the site of the facts were lost. The spokesman indicated that, when he entered the hospital, he handed the evidence to the agent on duty, asking the latter to deliver it to the National Police General Directorate; however, the evidence was never recovered. Mr. de León Palencia stated that the accident was due to a failure in the braking system.29 76(29) On January 19, 1994, the office of the judicial agency where the Carpio Nicolle case file was supposedly kept – the Santa Cruz de El Quiché Registry – was set on fire; remains of Molotov cocktails were found among the ashes. The file appears to have been mislaid for ten days. 76(30) In January 1994, at Guatemala’s request, the Ballistics Department of the Attorney General’s office (Procuraduría General de Justicia) of Mexico, D.F., 28 Cf. copy of the domestic judicial file of the Carpio case (file of appendixes to the requests and arguments brief, appendix 1, Piece V). 29 Cf. complaint filed by the prosecutor, Abraham Méndez García, on February 8, 1995, before the United Nations Verification Commission for Guatemala (file with appendixes to the application, appendix 10, tome I, vol. 2, folio 643).