BUENOS AIRES - The mother of dead Peruvian rebel leader, Nestor Cerpa Cartolini, plans to make a legal claim against Japan for the execution of her son, an Argentine newspaper reported yesterday. "My son was killed on Japanese territory," Ms Felicitas Cartolini told Argentina's Clarin in an interview from France where she lives with Cerpa's two sons. "And I am going to make a legal claim against the government of Japan."
Meanwhile, a Jesuit priest said that despite their avowed Marxist ideals, many of the Tupac Amaru rebels who seized the Japanese ambassador's home were religious and even asked a priest to bring them rosary heads. Father Juan Julio Wicht, one of the 71 hostages freed in the military raid on Tuesday, said he often asked the guerrillas to pray for a safe ending to the siege. He said the rebels had never spoken to a priest before.
A jubliant President Alberto Fujimori escorted the Japanese Foreign Minister, Mr Yukihiko Ikeda, on Saturday around the 3,000 year old tunnel ruins that inspired Peru's ingenious raid on the hostage takers. Mr Fujimori, buoyed by soaring popularity after rescuing all but one of the 72 hostages alive from the Japanese ambassadors house, said the tunnels his troops used to overrun the house owed their inspiration to the great Chavin de Huantar ruins.
Peru's Foreign Ministry has asked Germany to cancel political asylum status granted to the international spokesman for the Marxist rebel group involved in the hostage crisis, a local news paper reported yesterday.