Uncle Charged for Burning Down Hotel Manager’s House

Police have formally arrested and charged Raymundo Castellanos, a fisherman, for arson in relation to a fire last Thursday in the Riversdale community in southern Belize. Just after midday on October twentieth, police responded to a report of a house fire in the Riversdale area and found a wooden house belonging to Zulma Aguirre engulfed in flames. The twenty-five-year-old hotel manager told police that she lived in the house with two other family members and that she had been receiving threats from Castellanos, who is her uncle. No one was at home at the time of the fire and three dogs perished in the blaze.

Alden Dawson

ACP Alden Dawson, Head, National Crimes Investigation Branch, B.P.D.

“Police responded to a house fire in Riversdale. Upon arrival, they found a thirty by twenty wooden structure engulfed in flames and learned that the home was occupied by Zulma Aguirre, a Belizean hotel manager. She claimed that she had an altercation with a family member over an issue with some dogs and she was threatened that the person would have burnt the house. Police conducted an investigation and the investigation is ongoing, however, so far we have charged the uncle of the complainant, Raymundo Castellanos, forty-eight years, for the crime of arson.”

The house had an estimated value of one hundred thousand dollars. Also destroyed in the blaze was an Enduro outboard engine valued at ten thousand Belize dollars and almost four thousand dollars in cash.