Most Wanted South America - Thursday, April 10, 2008 8:09 - 0 Comments

Peru convicts death squad members

A three judge Peruvian court, presided over by Inés Villa , one of the most respected anti-corruption judges in Peru has convicted four members of an army death squad, of murdering nine students and a professor suspected of rebel links in 1992. On July 18, 1992, Professor Hugo Muñoz Sánchez and nine students were kidnapped from La Cantuta University. Their burned remains were later discovered in shallow graves on the outskirts of the capital.
The four men convicted of the 1992 killings were part of a squad known as “La Colina”, which existed in 1991 and 1992 and consisted of more than 30 members at its peak. Its members are also accused of a 1991 massacre of 15 people in a poor suburb of Lima known as Barrios Altos.

Julio Salazar Monroe, a retired army general and former head of the National Intelligence Service (SIN), was sentenced to 35 years in prison as an accessory before the fact, for instigating the crimes.

The court also sentenced three former members of the Colina Group, ex-army intelligence service (SIE) agents Fernando Lecca Sequen, José Alarcón Gonzales, and Orlando Vera Navarrete, to 15-year prison terms, for having participated in the kidnapping, torture and murder of the professor and students and the incineration of their bodies. Continue…