A campaign to solve unexplained cold cases marked its first transcontinental success on Thursday with the police agency Interpol reporting it identified a Paraguayan woman found hanged in Spain in 2018.
The France-based agency in a statement named the 33-year-old victim, previously known only as “the woman in the chicken coop,” as Ainoha Izaga Ibieta Lima.
It hailed the discovery as “the first successful trans-continental identification” in the global agency’s “Identify Me” campaign to identify more than 40 women found dead in six European countries over recent decades. Interpol has been seeking public help to put names to the missing women.
Police said that identification would mean they no longer have to identify the victims by their distinguishing features or apparel, such as “the woman with the flower tattoo” and “the woman with the artificial nails.” Other names include the locations where their remains were discovered like “the woman in the canal” and “the woman in the suitcase.”
Izaga’s brother reported her disappearance in 2019 and told investigators she had left Paraguay in 2013 for Spain.
She was found hanged on a farm in Girona, northeastern Spain, in August 2018.
There was nothing on her to identify her and the farm’s inhabitants and neighbours did not know who she was or where she was from.
After the launch of the Interpol appeal in 2023, Paraguayan authorities in March 2025 matched her fingerprints, supplied by Spain, to ones in their records.
The campaign claimed its first European success in November 2023 when authorities identified Rita Roberts, a British woman found murdered in Antwerp, Belgium in 1992. Relatives recognized her by a tattoo.
Interpol Secretary General Valdecy Urquiza said in the statement that the campaign was “about restoring dignity to victims and giving a voice to those affected by tragedy”.
Forty-five of the cases in the “Identify Me” files remain unsolved.
