Lawyers for former Guatemalan president Efrain Rios Montt on Friday said he is too sick to attend court this week, when he faces a retrial for genocide over the killings of indigenous people in the 1980s.
“The health condition of General Rios [Montt] has been deteriorating during the past year and doctors are watching him very closely to see if he’s in good enough shape to attend on Monday,” said Luis Rosales, a lawyer for Rios Montt.
The lawyer had asked the court if Rios Montt could be absent.
He said the 88-year-old suffers from back problems due to his advanced age, as well as heart and eye issues that would worsen during a lengthy trial.
Rios Montt “is being treated with absolute rest and doctors say he is only allowed to move to go to the bathroom, nothing else,” Rosales said, adding that the military continues to keep his client under house arrest in an upscale part of the capital.
The retired general faces a renewed trial on genocide charges that he ordered the massacre of indigenous Ixil Maya people in the 1980s as part of a scorched-earth policy during his dictatorship.
In May 2013, Guatemala’s Constitutional Court struck down on procedural grounds Montt’s conviction for genocide and war crimes, as well as the 80-year sentence given to the former dictator.
Rios Montt and his former intelligence chief, Jose Rodriguez, were charged with ordering the army to carry out 15 massacres that left 1,771 Maya Ixil Indians dead in Quiche in northern Guatemala. Rodriguez was acquitted.
About 200,000 people were killed or vanished without a trace in the country’s civil war from 1960 to 1996, a 1999 UN-sponsored report said.
More than 90 percent of the human rights violations took place between 1978 and 1984.
On Tuesday, Rios Montt’s defense asked for a judge in the case to be removed, saying she was biased because of views expressed in an academic dissertation she wrote in 2004.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in