\n Rights groups in El Salvador and victims' families welcomed on Monday a judge's order to arrest three former military officers for their alleged implication 40 years ago in the deaths of four Dutch journalists.\n<\/p>\n
\n In March 1982, the four journalists were killed in a rural area north of the capital San Salvador where they were filming a documentary about the Central American country's bloody civil war.\n<\/p>\n
\n A UN-sponsored Truth Commission established after the 1979-1992 war found that an army ambush had led to the deaths of Koos Jacobus Andries Koster, Jan Corenlius Kuiper Joop, Hans Lodewijk ter Laag and Johannes Jan Willemsen.\n<\/p>\n
\n On Friday, a judge in northern El Salvador ordered the arrest of three retired military officers: former defense minister General Jose Guillermo Garcia (1979-1983); Colonel Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena, who now lives in the United States; and former director of the Treasury Police, Colonel Francisco Antonio Moran.\n<\/p>\n
\n The prosecutor's office and the police did not provide any information about plans to carry out the arrests.\n<\/p>\n
\n Two other military officers, now deceased, were also named in connection with the journalists' deaths: former Joint Chiefs of Staff General Rafael Flores Lima and Sergeant Mario Canizales.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"The judge's decision is a very important step in the fight against impunity\" for this crime, Miguel Montenegro, coordinator of the Salvadoran Human Rights Commission (CDHES), told AFP.\n<\/p>\n
\n The victims' living relatives also welcomed the judge's decision.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"We have waited for this moment for forty years,\" said Gert Kuiper, brother of Jan Kuiper, in a video conference from the Netherlands.\n<\/p>\n
\n The case had been frozen in 1993, after the enactment of a law pardoning war crimes, but in 2016 that law was ruled unconstitutional, and groups filed criminal complaints in 2018.\n<\/p>\n
\n In 2020, the Salvadoran Institute for Access to Public Information (IAIP) requested the army open up its archives.\n<\/p>\n
\n A lawyer representing the journalists' relatives, Pedro Cruz of the Salvadoran Association for Human Rights (ASDEHU), said that the judge's decision \"closes the initial phase of the investigation.\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rights groups in El Salvador and victims' families welcomed on Monday a judge's order to arrest three former military officers for their alleged implication 40 years ago in the deaths of four Dutch journalists. In March 1982, the four journalists were killed in a rural area north of the capital San Salvador where they were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-107910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n