COLOMBIA:A Colombian army colonel and 14 soldiers have been convicted of killing members of an elite US- trained counter-narcotics police squad on orders of drug traffickers, one of the most sordid of several recent cases of alleged corruption in the armed forces.
A judge in Cali on Monday found Col Bayron Carvajal and the soldiers guilty of aggravated homicide in the slaughter of 10 police and an informant in a May 2006 ambush outside a rural nursing home near Cali. Sentences are to be imposed in two weeks.
The massacre was one of several scandals over the past two years to tarnish Colombia's armed forces and raise questions about the US-sponsored programme called Plan Colombia that began funnelling aid there in 2000.
The preponderance of Plan Colombia aid, which in recent years has averaged more than $650 million (€441 million) annually, has gone to expand, equip and train Colombia's military and national police.
Since 2006, high-ranking military officers have been accused of selling secrets to drug traffickers to help them elude capture and of staging fake bombs to gain career advancement. A recent report by human rights groups found that extrajudicial killings by the army had increased since the early years of Plan Colombia.
Carvajal maintained his innocence throughout the trial, saying he and his troops thought the police were drug traffickers.
More than 100 witnesses were called to testify, some of whom linked Carvajal to leftist guerrillas and drug gangs.
Defence attorneys said the legal process was tainted by statements from the attorney general and President Alvaro Uribe that the soldiers murdered the police.
The soldiers lay in wait and fired hundreds of rounds and threw grenades at the police unit as it was about to launch an operation to recover 100kg of cocaine that an informant had reported stashed inside a psychiatric facility in the town of Jamundi.
Six police officers were shot at close range. None of the soldiers was wounded. No drugs were ever found, and the informant, who prosecutors said spoke by phone with Carvajal shortly before the ambush, also was killed. -