Susana Cruz, the mother of Melani Hernández Cruz, a 16-year-old teenager who had been missing in Havana since last Monday, provided an update on Tuesday night, stating that her daughter has been found. She specified that the minor had been held against her will by a man.
"I've found my girl. That son of a b... had her kidnapped, tied up," the woman wrote alongside a photo of her daughter in a car.
Susana Cruz did not provide any further details about the circumstances surrounding her daughter's discovery, nor did she specify whether the alleged kidnapper has been apprehended by the police.
In the comments section of the post, a group of people expressed their happiness about the news, while others questioned the mother's account of the situation. Some suggested that the story might not be accurately told and that the teenager may have escaped voluntarily.
Susana Cruz had shared in a previous post the photo of her daughter's alleged captor and indicated that they had been seen in the Havana municipality of Marianao.
Previously, the mother of the teenager reported that her daughter had been last seen at the entrance of her school, the Raúl Cepero Bonilla polytechnic, in the La Víbora neighborhood of the Diez de Octubre municipality in Havana.
The woman said that on Monday morning her daughter did not go to class and that she had last been seen around 8:15 a.m.
In recent years—coinciding with the rise in violence in Cuba—reports of missing persons have become frequent, causing distress among families who, lacking an official channel to bring visibility to these cases, desperately turn to social media and independent media seeking help to locate their loved ones.
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