Peru's cabinet chief Mr Roberto Danino said today the government is to press under international rules for Japan to extradite Peru's ousted president Mr Alberto Fujimori under a campaign entitled "justice not revenge."
As soon as Peru "has prepared and established the legal route for Mr. Fujimori's extradition, we will see that international treaties to which Japan is a party are enforced," said Mr Danino, who leads President Alejandro Toledo's cabinet.
Tokyo insisted today it still had no plans to extradite the disgraced leader, hours after Peru's Congress voted late Monday to charge Fujimori with responsibility for two massacres carried out by a death squad.
Mr Danino said that the Peruvian government simply wants "Mr. Fujimori to do as he should and hand himself over to the courts."
Peruvian-born Fujimori, currently in self-imposed exile in Japan, boasts Japanese citizenship thanks to his Japanese-born parents.
Mr Fujimori posted on his web site that the vote by Congress was just a "show" put on by lawmakers. "My conscience is clear, I took on a country bloodied by terrorism and by authorities' excesses due to politicians' well-known blindness and lack of an integrated strategy," he said.
Meeting in a special session, Peru's Congress voted Monday night 75 to 0 to charge Mr Fujimori with homicide, inflicting serious injury, and abduction over the massacres carried out in 1991 and 1992 by a 35-man paramilitary hit squad known as Colina.
According to analysts, the killings took place at the height of the government fight against the Maoist Shining Path guerrilla group.
AFP