Guatemalan Police Seek Tourist’s Killers

Hundreds of police searched Thursday for gunmen who killed a Utah man when they attacked and robbed a minibus carrying Mormon tourists.

Police spokesman Faustino Sanchez said that no one had been arrested but that police had set up roadblocks in the area and were intensively investigating.

Thirteen people, most from Ogden and Salt Lake City, Utah, were headed from the mountain city of Quetzaltenango to the Mexican border Wednesday when five men with automatic weapons intercepted their bus about 100 miles west of Guatemala City.

Survivors told police that the gunmen opened fire to halt the bus, wounding the driver and Ogden architect Brett Richards, 52, who died en route to a nearby hospital.

The other passengers were taken off the roadside and forced to lie face-down while their belongings were stolen.

“It seemed like about a month,” said Richards’ cousin Ed Allen, who spoke to the Salt Lake Tribune from his hotel Wednesday night. “Most of us felt like we were going to be murdered.”

The group was driven back to Guatemala City, but police refused to divulge where they were staying or when they might fly back to the United States.

Andres Ramos, director-general of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Guatemala, said there was no evidence the attack had a religious motive.

“We were not the object of an attack as a church,” he said, calling the incident a robbery.

Family friend Mark DeCaria told the Standard-Examiner in Ogden that Richards and his family often visited Guatemala because he has relatives from the country.