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.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
RSS