A cashiered army lieutenant colonel and 14 soldiers were convicted on Monday of murdering 10 elite counternarcotics police agents in an ambush that showed how deeply drug corruption threatens Colombia's security forces.
Lieutenant Colonel Byron Carvajal and his soldiers face prison terms of up to 60 years. Prosecutors want Judge Edmundo Lopez to impose the maximum.
The convictions came despite numerous attempts to subvert the trial, including a prosecutor's offer to help the defense in exchange for more than US$400,000, senior police officials and prosecutors familiar with the case said.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing investigations, said the bribe was never paid and the prosecutor who sought it had been removed from the case before he made the offer.
Carvajal was convicted of ordering the May 22, 2006, ambush in the town of Jamundi, where an informant told police they would find at least 100kg of cocaine at a rural psychiatric center. When police pulled up, the soldiers cut them down with 420 bullets and seven grenades. No drugs were found.
Carvajal, who was not at the scene, said his soldiers believed they were surprising leftist rebels. The other defendants refused to testify to avoid incriminating themselves.
The judge, hearing the case in this western city near Jamundi, determined that Carvajal had planned the killings.
"I hope they rot in jail," said Alvaro Garcia, an uncle of slain drug agent Roosevelt Garcia, after the verdict.
Defense attorney Eugenio Vergara said the defendants would appeal after sentencing, which Lopez set for April 21.
Speaking after the verdict, Carvajal claimed innocence.
"This father of four children who you have just declared responsible had no motive whatsoever to order the murder of these agents," he said.
He and another defendant described themselves as wronged patriots.
"I've fought so that all you people here today can be free," former Lieutenant Harrison Castro told the court. "I and the 14 others here, including Colonel Byron, would have preferred dying in combat with rebels to dying here unjustly."
Prosecutors didn't present evidence about suspected motives. Top army officials initially called it tragic "friendly fire." Senior police officials said they believe the soldiers were protecting a major drug trafficker.
One thing is clear, chief prosecutor Mario Iguaran said: "It was a massacre related to organized criminals."
While witnesses linked Carvajal to Wilson Figueroa, a drug trafficker captured last year in Cali, those ties were not explained.
Mafias have long infiltrated Colombia's security forces -- back to the days of the slain drug lord Pablo Escobar. A retired army general and cashiered navy admiral are among those currently under investigation for allegedly aiding drug lords. But soldiers have rarely killed their colleagues in the service of drug mafias.
The slain agents, some of whom trained in the US, belonged to the most elite unit of Colombia's judicial investigative police, working closely with DEA agents to seize cocaine and arrest traffickers, said Colonel Nicolas Munoz, the agency's deputy director.
Most died of shots to the head, neck and chest. In the midst of the fusillade, some managed distress calls.
Police got off just 30 shots. Not a single soldier was wounded.
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