El Salvador convicts army officers for 1982 killing of 4 Dutch journalists
Former Minister of National Defence Colonel Jose Guillermo Garcia, 91, former police Colonel Francisco Moran, 93, and ex-infantry brigade commander Colonel Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena, 85, were found guilty late on Tuesday by a jury in the northern city of Chalatenango, a lawyer said.
The Diario El Salvador news outlet reported that the three former officers – none of whom was present in court – were sentenced to 15 years in prison each for the killings.
The four Dutch journalists, Koos Koster, Jan Kuiper, Hans ter Laag and Joop Willemsen, were killed while filming a television documentary on El Salvador's civil war, which saw an estimated 75,000 civilians killed – mostly by United States-backed government security forces – between 1980 and 1992.
The journalists had linked up with leftist rebels and planned to spend several days behind the front lines reporting on the war. But Salvadoran soldiers armed with assault rifles and machineguns ambushed them and the rebels.
'We have clearly shown the level of responsibility of the accused,' said Oscar Perez, a lawyer for the Foundation Comunicandonos, which represents the victims.
'The entire organised power structure that intervened in the political-military decisions that led to the murder of the journalists,' he said.
A United Nations-sponsored Truth Commission in 1993 found that the journalists had walked into an ambush trap that was planned by Reyes, who still lives in the US, and with the knowledge of other officers.
The Salvadoran Supreme Court approved an extradition request for Reyes in March, but there has been no progress in his return from the US so far.
The ageing Garcia and Moran are under police surveillance in a private hospital in the capital, San Salvador.
García was deported from the US in 2016, after a US judge declared him responsible for serious human rights violations during the early years of the war between the military and the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front fighters.
The prosecution of the men was reopened in 2018 after the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a general amnesty passed following the end of the civil war.
The case against the suspects moved slowly, but in March 2022, relatives of the victims and representatives of the Dutch government as well as the European Union demanded that those responsible for the journalists' killing face trial.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Wall Street Journal
20 minutes ago
- Wall Street Journal
Trump Administration to Screen Immigrants for ‘Anti-American' Views
The Trump administration plans to scrutinize social media for 'anti-American ideologies' when deciding to grant visa or green-card applications. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the primary agency in charge of legal immigration, said Tuesday that its officers should give significant weight to evidence that an immigrant 'has any involvement in anti-American or terrorist organizations' when reviewing residency, work and visa applications.
USA Today
35 minutes ago
- USA Today
Man who killed 3 people in Polk County in 1990 could be Florida's 12th execution this year
A man who killed three family members in Mulberry in 1990 is now scheduled to be the state's 12th execution this year. David Joseph Pittman, 63, will be executed Sept. 17 at Florida State Prison, according to a death warrant signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis on Aug. 15. The warrant was posted on the Florida Supreme Court website, along with court documents. In 1991, Pittman was convicted of the murders of Clarence and Barbara Knowles and their daughter, Bonnie Knowles, the previous year. According to records, the Knowles family was related to Pittman's ex-wife. Pittman killed the three family members before setting their home on fire with them in it. He also set fire to Bonnie Knowles' car. He was sentenced to death for each and also charged with two counts of arson and grand theft. In a 6-1 decision in April 2022, the Supreme Court denied Pittman's claim that he's intellectually disabled as well as arguments that his death sentences are illegal because he hasn't received an evidentiary hearing on his disability claim. Pittman's first appeal was in 2015, and the Supreme Court said Pittman did not appeal the denial of his first two appeals, successive motions, and his third, amended appeal was mistitled as his "second" appeal. "We agree with the postconviction court that Pittman is not entitled to postconviction relief on his intellectual disability claim because that claim is untimely," the Supreme Court said in a news release. The Supreme Court said he would have been required to raise his intellectual disability claim no later than 60 days after October 1, 2004, because the laws don't apply backward. Pittman argued that his IQ score of 70 from 2015 is newly discovered evidence, so the Supreme Court deemed his motion untimely because it wasn't filed within one year of the date the claim was discoverable. The Supreme Court said records refute Pittman's claim that the IQ information could not have been discoverable before 2015. DeSantis has already signed a record number of death warrants this year. On July 31, the execution of Edward Zakrzewski was Florida's ninth this year, surpassing state records of eight executions in 1984 and 2014, when Democrat Bob Graham and now-U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, a Republican, were the governors signing death warrants. Two others are scheduled before Sept. 17. Kayle B. Bates, 67, convicted of killing of a Bay County woman in 1992, is scheduled for execution on Aug. 19 after the Florida Supreme Court denied a last-minute appeal on Aug. 13. Curtis Windom, 59, is scheduled to be executed Aug. 28 for the murders of three people in Orange County in 1992. Information from Ledger archives and the USA TODAY Network-Florida was used in this report.
Yahoo
36 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Hillary Clinton: Supreme Court ‘will do to gay marriage what they did to abortion'
2016 Democratic presidential nominee and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says she believes the Supreme Court is poised to overturn its landmark ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which effectively legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, and that unmarried same-sex couples 'ought to consider' tying the knot. 'American voters, and to some extent the American media, don't understand how many years the Republicans have been working in order to get us to this point,' Clinton told Fox News host Jessica Tarlov on Friday in a wide-ranging interview on 'Raging Moderates,' the podcast Tarlov co-hosts with Scott Galloway. 'It took 50 years to overturn Roe v. Wade,' Clinton said. 'The Supreme Court will hear a case about gay marriage; my prediction is they will do to gay marriage what they did to abortion — they will send it back to the states.' 'Anybody in a committed relationship out there in the LGBTQ community, you ought to consider getting married because I don't think they'll undo existing marriages, but I fear they will undo the national right,' she said. In July, Kim Davis, the former Kentucky county clerk who was briefly jailed in 2015 for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, formally asked the Supreme Court to revisit its Obergefell decision, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in June. The justices have not yet said whether they will take up the case. If Obergefell were overturned, same-sex marriage rights would still be protected by the Respect for Marriage Act, a bipartisan measure signed by former President Biden in 2022 that requires all states and the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages performed in states where they are legal. 'Zombie laws' against marriage equality in more than half the nation are unenforceable because of the Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell. The Respect for Marriage Act, introduced after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said the court 'should reconsider' decisions including Obergefell after overturning the federal right to abortion, prevents state statutes and constitutional amendments banning gay marriage from being enforced on already married couples, but it does not render them entirely obsolete. In addition to Thomas, Justice Samuel Alito has also voiced opposition to the Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell, to which he and Thomas dissented in 2015. Last winter, in a five-page statement explaining the court's decision not to involve itself in a dispute between the Missouri Department of Corrections and jurors dismissed for disapproving of same-sex marriage on religious grounds, Alito wrote that the conflict 'exemplifies the danger' he had long anticipated would come from the ruling. 'Namely, that Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be 'labeled as bigots and treated as such' by the government,' he wrote. Public support for marriage equality remains at historic highs, though a May Gallup poll showed support among Republicans slipping to 41 percent, the lowest in a decade. In a separate survey conducted by a trio of polling firms in June, 56 percent of Republican respondents said they support same-sex marriage rights. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
