Former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori once again claimed his innocence on Wednesday in one of his last chances to defend himself ahead of the verdict in a lengthy human rights abuse trial.
Fujimori is the first democratically elected president in Latin America to be brought to trial for alleged human rights violations.
He is accused of ordering two massacres that killed 25 people and designing a “dirty war” strategy to combat leftist insurgents including the Maoist Shining Path group and the Tupac Amaru guerrilla movement during his 1990 to 2000 presidency.
If convicted, the 70-year-old faces up to 30 years in prison.
The iron-willed ex-president, now in poor health, has been on trial since December 2007. He is already serving a six-year prison term for abuse of power in an unrelated case.
“I want to repeat what I’ve said from the start, which has been strengthened because no witness has been able to incriminate me,” Fujimori said on Wednesday. “As I said from the start, I’m innocent.”
“In today’s peaceful and stable Peru, it would be very difficult to understand the actions of that period,” Fujimori said.
The case against Fujimori focuses on the November 1991 massacre in the neighborhood of Barrios Altos, in which 15 people were killed, and the July 1992 shooting at La Cantuta University, in which 10 people were killed. A hit squad of Peruvian soldiers carried out the killings.
Fujimori is also on trial for the 1992 abductions of journalist Gustavo Gorriti and businessman Samuel Dyer.
The ex-president’s attorney, Cesar Nakazaki, said on Monday that there was a lack of proof in the charges against his client.
Fujimori is also due to testify today and the special tribunal handling the case will announce the date of its sentence shortly afterwards.
The former president fled to Tokyo in 2000 amid a deepening corruption scandal and resigned the presidency by fax from his hotel.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home