Peru's imprisoned ex-spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos went on trial as one of 57 defendants charged with ordering two paramilitary death squad massacres and kidnappings carried out in the early 1990s during former President Alberto Fujimori's autocratic regime.
About 100 demonstrators blocked traffic early Wednesday outside the maximum security naval base in Lima's port of Callao, where the case was being tried in a packed courtroom.
"Colina assassins murdered our children," they chanted, referring to the "Colina group" death squad that Montesinos is accused of directing.
"We are going to be here to accompany in solidarity the families who have waited for years for justice," said Francisco Soberon, executive secretary of Peru's National Human Rights Coordinator, an umbrella organization representing 63 human rights groups.
35 victims
Prosecutor Pablo Sanchez is seeking a 35-year sentence for Montesinos, as well as fines of 100,000 soles, or about US$30,740, for each of the death squad's 35 victims.
Montesinos, 60, is already serving a 15-year prison sentence for various corruption convictions.
His attorney, Estela Valdivia, tried unsuccessfully Wednesday to convince the presiding tribunal to postpone the trial, arguing the prosecution's indictment sent to her was in a format that she could not open on her computer, local media reported.
As the day wore on, other defense attorneys tried to get a postponement through other means, but those, too, were rejected.
"The defense for the accused shared a common strategy geared at delaying the trial," Peru's ad hoc anti-corruption attorney, Antonio Maldonado, told Canal N television as the proceedings wrapped up for the day. "Fortunately, the trial is now underway."
Montesinos allegedly ordered the death squad to carry out the 1991 murders of 15 people. The victims were gunned down with machine guns, their bodies left strewn about a tenement building in an impoverished downtown Lima neighborhood.
The Colina group allegedly kidnapped nine students and a professor from La Cantuta University months later. Their incinerated bodies were found a year later buried on a barren hillside outside the capital.
sympathizers targeted
Both massacres were intended strikes at suspected sympathizers of the Maoist Shining Path insurgency, which ravaged Peru during the 1980s and early 1990s with car bomb attacks, sabotage and assassinations.
Montesinos is also accused of helping to mastermind the 1992 disappearances of nine townspeople from Santa, in the Department of Ancash, and a radio journalist in Huacho, north of the capital, at the hands of the Colina group.
Prosecutors say Fujimori sanctioned the death squad killings, though he is not a named defendant in the trial.
Fujimori, who denies any wrongdoing, fled in November 2000 to Japan, where he remains fighting two extradition requests -- one based on his alleged links to the Colina group, and the other accusing him of making a US$15 million payoff to Montesinos in September 2000 with misappropriated state funds.
power-broker
Montesinos, known as a behind-the-scenes power-broker during Fujimori's decade-long rule, left office in disgrace after the broadcast of a now-famous video in September 2000 showing him paying a newly elected opposition congressman US$15,000 to back the government -- a bribe that precipitated Fujimori's downfall.
Sanchez is also seeking 35-year sentences for the Colina Group's jailed leader, former Army Major Martin Rivas, as well as Peru's former armed forces commander General Nicolas Hermoza and former head of the intelligence service, Julio Salazar Monroe.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS