A former protection minister of El Salvador and two retired colonels have been convicted of the 1982 killings of 4 Dutch journalists through the nation’s civil warfare, a lawyer for households of the deceased stated.
A five-member jury sentenced the defendants, now of their 80s or 90s, to fifteen years in jail after an 11-hour session on the primary day of the trial on Tuesday.
In a criminal offense that shocked the world, Koos Koster, Jan Kuiper, Hans ter Laag and Joop Willemsen have been killed whereas filming a tv documentary.
Greater than 75,000 folks have been killed in El Salvador’s 1980-1992 civil warfare pitting the US-backed army in opposition to leftist guerrillas.
The Dutch reporters labored for IKON TV, a Dutch channel based by a number of church buildings.
The accused are Normal José Guillermo García, 91, former police colonel Francisco Antonio Morán, 93, and ex-infantry brigade commander Mario Reyes Mena, 85.
None of them have been in court docket for the trial, which was performed with press and held within the northern metropolis of Chalatenango.
“The struggle in opposition to impunity took a very long time, nevertheless it was gained,” the Dutch ambassador for all of Central America, Arjen van den Berg, stated outdoors the courthouse.
In 1993, a UN-sponsored Reality Fee discovered the journalists had walked into an ambush deliberate by Reyes, who lives in the USA, and with the data of different officers.
The Salvadorian supreme court docket permitted an extradition request for Reyes in March, however there was no progress to this point.
García and Morán are beneath police surveillance in a personal hospital in San Salvador.
The defendants had confronted as much as 30 years in jail however obtained much less time due to their age and in poor health well being, the lawyer Cruz stated.
The NGOs Fundación Comunicándonos and the Salvadorian Affiliation for Human Rights hailed the trial as a “decisive step” within the seek for reality and justice.
“We belief that this trial units a historic precedent within the struggle in opposition to impunity,” they stated in a joint assertion.
The case remained unresolved for many years after the presiding choose acquired threats in 1988, prompting her to hunt refuge in Canada.
It was reopened in 2018 after the supreme court docket declared an amnesty legislation for civil warfare crimes unconstitutional, however kin of the victims nonetheless needed to wait years for the primary listening to.
Proof resembling a press release from a former US army attache and a army professional’s report “straight factors” to the defendants’ duty, stated lawyer Pedro Cruz, who represents the victims’ households.
Garcáa led the Armed Forces from 1979 to 1983, when the worst massacres perpetrated by the army passed off.
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