Massacre accused gets 6,060 years in jail
Source: Agencies |
March 14, 2012, Wednesday
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A Guatemalan court has sentenced a former special forces soldier to 6,060 years in prison for participating in a 1982 massacre that claimed 201 lives.
Pedro Pimentel, 55, was deported from Los Angeles to Guatemala last year to face charges of murder and crimes against humanity and is the fifth soldier to be sentenced in the Central American nation for his role in the Las Dos Erres massacre at the height of the country's brutal civil war.
The length of the sentence is largely symbolic because Guatemala's laws only allow a maximum of 50 years.
A former soldier who took part in the massacre testified that Pimentel was among a group of some 20 soldiers ordered to the village in December 1982 to search for missing weapons.
The soldiers then blindfolded, strangled and bludgeoned villagers and a newborn child to death with a sledgehammer before dumping them down a 15-meter-deep well.
Pimentel, a former member of the Kaibiles elite unit, was given 30 years for each victim killed in the attack and 30 years for crimes against humanity.
Now grey haired, Pimentel denied being present at the massacre, saying he left the area in November 1982 to prepare enrollment papers for the School of the Americas in Panama.
The ruling comes as Guatemala seeks to clean up atrocities from the bloody 1960-1996 internal conflict in which nearly a quarter of a million people died or went missing.
A judge sentenced four soldiers to 6,060 years in prison each last August for the massacre.
Pedro Pimentel, 55, was deported from Los Angeles to Guatemala last year to face charges of murder and crimes against humanity and is the fifth soldier to be sentenced in the Central American nation for his role in the Las Dos Erres massacre at the height of the country's brutal civil war.
The length of the sentence is largely symbolic because Guatemala's laws only allow a maximum of 50 years.
A former soldier who took part in the massacre testified that Pimentel was among a group of some 20 soldiers ordered to the village in December 1982 to search for missing weapons.
The soldiers then blindfolded, strangled and bludgeoned villagers and a newborn child to death with a sledgehammer before dumping them down a 15-meter-deep well.
Pimentel, a former member of the Kaibiles elite unit, was given 30 years for each victim killed in the attack and 30 years for crimes against humanity.
Now grey haired, Pimentel denied being present at the massacre, saying he left the area in November 1982 to prepare enrollment papers for the School of the Americas in Panama.
The ruling comes as Guatemala seeks to clean up atrocities from the bloody 1960-1996 internal conflict in which nearly a quarter of a million people died or went missing.
A judge sentenced four soldiers to 6,060 years in prison each last August for the massacre.
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