Ecuador court calls vice president of Colombia for death of Mexicans
Ecuadornews:
Several Colombian officials, including the current vice president, Óscar Naranjo Trujillo, were called to appear before the Ecuadorian Justice for the start of the trial for the alleged crime of killing four Mexican students 10 years ago in a bombing of a FARC camp.
“Trial is opened to prosecute them for murder, but we are seeking to incriminate them for the crime against humanity because of the premeditated aggression against people who could not defend themselves,” Luis Saavedra, director of the Regional Human Rights Advisory Foundation, told Efe today. , which represents the families of the four students.
The facts go back to March 1, 2008 when the Colombian Army bombed a temporary FARC camp located in Ecuadorian territory, in the Angostura sector.
According to the indictment, ten cluster bombs GBU-12-Paveway were launched from Colombian forces with the cooperation of the US, over the camp where a group of students and guerrillas spent the night.
In total, 25 people lost their lives in the air attack, among them, Edgar Devia, alias “Raul Reyes”, second commander of the FARC, an Ecuadorian citizen and the four students of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) they found in place of the facts for academic reasons.
The Single Room of the Provincial Court of Justice of Sucumbíos rejected yesterday a recourse of the defenders of the Colombian suspects to declare the process null.
In addition to Naranjo Trujillo, who was also a plenipotentiary negotiator for the Colombian government in negotiations with the FARC, the military officers in charge of that operation are Mario Montoya Uribe, Guillermo Barrera, Jorge Ballesteros, Freddy Padilla de León and Camilo Ernesto Álvarez Ochoa.
Padilla de León is a member of the Executive Delegation of Juan Manuel Santos in peace talks with the National Liberation Army (ELN), and Montoya Uribe is excommander of the Colombian National Army.
The Ecuadorian court also ordered the presumed parties to appear before the National Court to process the trial hearing.
The judges notified in their resolution that “they present themselves voluntarily or in turn, proceed to locate, locate and capture the accused so that the trial hearing may be held.”
The head of INREDH considered “unlikely” that the defendants appear before the court and considered the decision of the court “more of a political nature than with legal effectiveness.”
However, before the non-appearance, the Ecuadorian Ministry of Foreign Affairs must proceed to process the request for the extradition of the Colombian accused and, in parallel, the legal status of the case has been raised in a brief to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. EFE (I).