Murder mystery

Rodrigo Rosenberg was a 47 year old lawyer living in Guatemala City. In April 2009, gunmen on a motorcycle attacked kill his client, industrialist Khalil Musa. This sort of killing is not unusual in Guatemala, a country rife with corruption and organised crime. Musa was killed alongside his daughter Marjorie, with whom Rosenberg was having an affair. Rosenberg spent weeks investigating the murders, becoming convinced it was part of a plot linked to left-wing president Alvaro Colom.

On 10 May 2009, at 8am, Rosenberg left his home on a bicycle, and shortly afterwards he was shot dead by assassins driving a Mazda. At his funeral, his friend Luis Mendizábal handed out copies of a video that Rosenberg had made four days before his death. In it, Rosenberg accused President Colom of trying to have him killed, naming the President's private secretary Gustavo Alejos and businessman Gregorio Valdez as accomplices. Guatemala was thrown into turmoil with protestors filling the streets and politicians demanding the president resign.

A team from the UN arrived to investigate the killing. The street where Rosenberg died was overlooked by several security cameras, and the investigators were able to identify the killers and eventually force them to talk. They discovered that Rosenberg had bought mobile phones and used them to makes death threats to himself, and even more incredibly he himself hired the assassins who gunned him down in the street. Rosenberg had fabricated evidence to frame Colom and in dying sought to pin his own death on the man he believed had killed his girlfriend - with Marjorie Musa dead and hopes of justice unravelling, suicide seemed not that bad an option.

It is a plot worthy of the darkest film noir or most convoluted Agatha Christie. Source: The Guardian.