Featured Image Credit: Family of María Ángela Olguín / @tavojeda5/Twitter
Topics: Crime, World News
Ben Thompson
Topics: Crime, World News
A girl who claims she was kidnapped and left in a bin bag has been accused by the Mexican government of lying about her ordeal.
María Ángela Olguín was 16 when she went missing in January and it took 48 hours before she was found again, when she was found wrapped in a bin bag on the outskirts of Mexico City.
Images of the girl circulated online after her discovery, showing her wrapped in a foil blanket, wearing only her underwear and socks.
Her hands and feet were tied.
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The police officer who found her said: "She had masking tape tied around her stomach which means she had a lot of pain in her back.
"She was really desperate. She wanted the binds off her."
Olguín’s body showed signs of abuse, according to her lawyer.
She had gone missing on January 19 while waiting outside a train station bathroom for her mother.
Although she claims to have been kidnapped, the Mexican government disputes this account.
The Mexico City prosecutor's office said Olguín wandered off.
Ulises Lara, a spokesperson for the office, said: "The teenager’s absence was voluntary—she wasn’t the victim of a crime."
CCTV footage pieced together by the authorities suggested, he said, that Olguín went to the centre of the capital city after leaving her mother in the metro station.
There, she allegedly hung out with a feminist activist group, which has a stall in a central park, for a couple of days. Lara said that she was never abducted.
Olguín claims that when she was taken, she was placed into a room with two other young girls.
Speaking to VICE News, the family's lawyer Maricruz Garcia said: "The girls she was being held with had been held for a while."
In the aftermath of her discovery, media attention began to build and Olguín and her family went into hiding.
The Mexico City government disputes the idea that a human trafficking ring was operating near where Garcia was found.
Garcia, meanwhile, claims the pictures and videos the government circulated to back up its narrative showed a different girl, not her client.
She added: "Maria Angela never mentioned a feminist collective—not in her conversations with me or with the prosecutor’s office.
"We want the city prosecutor to apologize for saying what it has about the case, and pay damages."
The Mexico City government has not retracted its statement about the case, nor has it provided any updates in the investigation.