The night of February 17, police officers, apprehended three individuals for illegal possession of a hunting weapon, and who were also identified to be responsible for beating a sea lion to death within the Peninsula Valdés Natural Area.
30 kilometers away from Puerto Pirámides, «a police employee intercepted a pickup truck coming from that city towards Puerto Madryn. When identifying the passengers, a rifle could be spotted on the back seats; being that the reason why the men had to get out of it. The suspects did not have any documentation of the weapon with them, thus, it was confiscated.
The person under arrest was accused of illegal possession of a gun, and the police established that the three suspects had been responsible for having violently killed a sea lion at Playa Villarino, a beach belonging to the Natural Protected Area of Península Valdés.
The police reported that the men under arrest are fishermen and have killed a sea lion that got tangled-up with their fishing net, by hitting it with an oar or a similar object. There were witnesses to the incident.
Gustavo Martínez, a nurse at Hospital Puerto Pirámides Hospital, was the one who notified and filed a complaint about the attack on the sea lion. «He beat it until he killed it», asserted Martínez in an interview with AzM Radio.