Four Dutch journalists were killed during the brutal civil war in El Salvador in 1982 when three former military officers were found guilty.
A jury in the northern city of Chalatenango found them guilty late on Tuesday, along with former minister of national defense Colonel Jose Guillermo Garcia, 91, former police colonel Francisco Moran, 93, and former army brigade commander Colonel Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena, 85, according to a lawyer.
The three former officers were given 15 years in prison each for the killings, according to a report from The Diario El Salvador news outlet.
Koos Koster, Jan Kuiper, Hans ter Laag, and Joop Willemsen, four Dutch journalists, were killed while filming a television documentary about El Salvador’s civil war, which saw 75, 000 civilian casualties killed between 1980 and 1992, most of whom were killed by US-backed government security forces.
The journalists planned to spend several days reporting on the war from the front lines and had ties to leftist rebels. However, they and the rebels were ambushed by Salvadoran soldiers carrying assault rifles and machineguns.
The Foundation Comunicandonos, an organization that represents victims, said Oscar Perez, an attorney, “we have clearly demonstrated the level of responsibility of the accused.”
He claimed that “the entire organized power structure” had made political-military decisions that led to the journalists’ murder.
In 1993, a UN-sponsored Truth Commission discovered that Reyes, who still lives in the US, knew that the journalists had entered an ambush trap.
Reyes’ extradition request was approved by the Salvadoran Supreme Court in March, but so far no progress has been made.
In a private hospital in San Salvador, the capital, are the elderly Garcia and Moran being watched by police.
After a US judge found him guilty of serious human rights violations in the early years of the conflict between the military and the leftist Farabundo Mart National Liberation Front, Garca was deported in 2016.
Following the end of the civil war, the Supreme Court reinstated the men’s legal rights in 2018.
Source: Aljazeera
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