A Peruvian court began this Monday the oral trial against the octogenarian former president Alberto Fujimori for a massacre of six peasants perpetrated by the military under his government (1990-2000), in a case that could cost him, if found guilty, a new sentence of 25 years in prison.
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Despite having been released this month for the restitution of a pardon after 16 years in prison, Fujimori must appear in the last pending process with the justice system of his country.
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The crime for which he is accused occurred within the framework of the war against terrorism that the armed forces waged against the Maoist group Sendero Luminoso and the Guevarist MRTA, which left a total of some 70,000 deaths and 20,000 missing between 1980 and 2000.
Fujimori, 85, participated in the hearing remotely with his lawyer Elio Riera installed in his daughter Keiko's house, where He has been living since he left prison on December 6 after the Constitutional Court restored a 2017 pardon “for humanitarian reasons”.
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We have to prove the innocence of the former president. The important thing is that none of the people link him (to the deaths).
The former president spoke with a broken voice only to answer to the judge where he was. He was wearing a dark shirt and vest.
Fujimori was sitting and connected to a small oxygen cylinder through a tube. His ailments include tongue cancer, atrial fibrillation and hypertension.
“We have to prove the innocence of the former president. The important thing is that none of the people link him (to the deaths),” said his lawyer.
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In February 2018, The Judiciary resolved that the pardon that Fujimori received “lacks legal effects” for the Pativilca Case.
The hearing lasted 180 minutes in the Fourth National Superior Criminal Court for Liquidation, which must resolve the prosecutor's request for 25 years in prison against those responsible for the murder of six peasants committed in January 1992 by an army death squad known as the “group Hill”.
Prosecutors in the Pativilca case attribute Fujimori the “mediate authorship” of the massacre, a classification that involves the chain of command of an organization. Peruvian law establishes that the president is “the supreme head of the Armed Forces.”
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Released in compliance with an order of the Constitutional Court
“Mediated authorship” is the same charge that the prosecution used in 2009 to sentence him to 25 years for the deaths of 25 people in two massacres in 1991 and 1992.
The former president, of Japanese ancestors, is prosecuted along with 22 people. Among them his former intelligence advisor Vladimiro Montesinos, former army chief Nicolás Hermoza and Major Santiago Martín Rivas, squad leader. All of them are prisoners.
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The incident occurred in Pativilca, an agricultural town on the coast located about 200 km north of Lima.
AFP
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