SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — Three former El Salvador navy officers got prolonged jail sentences late Thursday over the 1982 killings of four Dutch journalists throughout the nation’s civil battle.
It means former Protection Minister Gen. José Guillermo García, 91, former treasury police director Col. Francisco Morán, 93, and Col. Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena, 85, will virtually actually die in jail.
Within the sentence, seen by The Related Press, the courtroom imposed 15-year sentences requested by the prosecution cumulative for every sufferer, including as much as 60 years. Nonetheless, the courtroom will observe the utmost sentence allowed on the time of the killings, which was 30 years.
The courtroom additionally ordered President Nayib Bukele, who’s the commander in chief of the armed forces, to concern a public apology to the victims’ households.
Final month, a jury convicted the three officers after a trial that was closed to the general public.
García and Morán are underneath police guard at a non-public hospital in San Salvador, the place they may serve out their sentences at their expense, the courtroom dominated.
Reyes Mena — who was the previous military commander of the Fourth Infantry Brigade in Chalatenango — lives in the US. In March, El Salvador’s Supreme Court docket ordered that the extradition course of be began to deliver him again.
“Fact and justice have gained over impunity and it is a historic occasion for El Salvador,” mentioned Oscar Pérez of the Fundación Comunicandonos, which represents the households.
The Dutch TV journalists — Jan Kuiper, Koos Koster, Hans ter Laag and Joop Willemson — had linked up with leftist rebels and deliberate to spend a number of days behind insurgent strains reporting. However Salvadoran troopers armed with assault rifles and machine weapons ambushed them and the guerrillas.
The United Nations Fact Fee for El Salvador, which was arrange as a part of a U.N.-brokered peace settlement in 1992, concluded there was clear proof that the killings have been the results of an ambush arrange by Reyes Mena with the data of different officers, based mostly on an intelligence report that alerted of the journalists’ presence.
Different members of the navy, together with Gen. Rafael Flores Lima and Sgt. Mario Canizales Espinoza have been additionally accused of involvement, however died. Canizales allegedly led the patrol that carried out the bloodbath of the journalists.
An estimated 75,000 civilians have been killed throughout El Salvador’s civil battle, largely by U.S.-backed authorities safety forces.