Colombian court accused soldiers of killing 120 civilians | Conflict News

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The Peace Tribunal charged 10 Colombian soldiers with murdering at least 120 civilians and falsely claiming that they were fighters.

The Colombian court charged 10 soldiers and a civilian with forcibly missing 24 people, murdering at least 120 civilians, and falsely describing them as soldiers killed in battle.

This is the first time that the Bogotá’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) Tribunal has accused military members of participating in the so-called “False positive” scandal.

JEP is investigating crimes and atrocities committed during the half-century of armed conflict in the country, Reigned earlier this year The Colombian military carried out at least 6,400 extrajudicial executions between 2002 and 2008 and classified them as combat deaths.

The court said on Tuesday that the defendant played a decisive role in the murders described as fighting deaths in the Catatumbo district of Santander Norte Province, Colombia from January 2007 to August 2008.

The JEP identified as the person responsible for issuing orders. Without these orders, crimes would not have occurred systematically. The defendants included a general, six officers, three non-commissioned officers, and a civilian.

“This is a macro-crime model, which means that at least 120 murders have been repeated in the same area within two years, by the same group of people associated with the criminal organization and following the same modus operandi,” Magistrate Catalina Diaz said. Tuesday.

The court was established under the 2016 peace agreement to prosecute former members of the FARC rebel organization and Colombian military leaders for war crimes.

Dozens of military officers were detained and convicted by the Colombian regular court system for their involvement in the murder, and testified before JEP when seeking a more lenient sentence.

Eduardo Cifuentes, the magistrate and JEP chairman, said that if defendants do not accept charges within 30 days on Tuesday, they could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison in civil courts.

According to the New York Times, Human Rights Watch’s Colombian researcher Juan Pappier called the court’s statement “a defense for victims and human rights organizations who have been fighting for justice in this case for more than a decade.”

For many years, human rights organizations have believed that the practice of soldiers killing civilians and mistakenly treating civilians as enemy combatants is more common than the Colombian government has recognized.

A 2018 report compiled from official sources and independent research estimated that more than 10,000 civilians were murdered during the reign of former President Alvaro Uribe.

Although the highest military command denies System policy As the so-called “false positives” exaggerated the number of left-wing insurgents killed, soldiers and officials told the court that their superiors pressured them to increase the surface of the success of government military operations during the civil war.



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