Colombian Army Accused In Massacre of Drug Police
Prosecutor Alleges Soldiers Worked for Traffickers
By Joshua Goodman
Associated Press
Sunday, June 18, 2006; Page A17
JAMUNDI, Colombia -- About an hour before dusk, on a dirt road dotted with country homes near the western city of Cali, three trucks carrying an elite squad of anti-narcotics police pulled up to the gates of a psychiatric center for a planned raid.
Within minutes, all 10 officers in the U.S.-trained unit were dead. An informant who led the police squad to the scene promising they would find a large stash of cocaine was also found dead. When investigators removed his ski mask, they found a bullet hole in his head.
The alleged killers were no typical outlaws. They were a platoon of 28 soldiers who unleashed a barrage of some 150 bullets and seven grenades from roadside ditches and from behind bushes, according to a ballistics investigator.
"You could hear the police shouting they had families and begging the soldiers not to shoot," said Arcesio Morales, 56, a patient at the psychiatric center who hid in a ditch during the 30-minute fusillade.
In the hours after the May 22 ambush, the head of the Colombian army stood by his men, calling the massacre a tragic case of friendly fire, with the soldiers likely having mistaken the armed police for leftist rebels known to operate in the area.
But the nation's chief criminal investigator quickly produced a more chilling motive. "This was not a mistake, it was a crime -- a deliberate, criminal decision," Mario Iguaran, the prosecutor general, said on June 1. "The army was doing the bidding of drug traffickers."
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