Three former senior officers in El Salvador's army have been convicted of the murder of four Dutch journalists during the country's civil war in 1982, Al Jazeera reported, quoted by BTA.
The convicted are former national defense minister Colonel Jose Guillermo Garcia, former police colonel Francisco Moran, and colonel Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena, who commanded an infantry brigade. All three were found guilty and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
The journalists - Kus Koster, Jan Kuyper, Hans ter Laag and Joop Willemsen - died while filming a television documentary about the course of the civil war, which claimed the lives of an estimated 75,000 people between 1980 and 1992. They had planned to stay behind the front lines with rebels for several days when they were ambushed by Salvadoran soldiers armed with assault rifles and machine guns.
According to a 1993 report by the UN-backed Truth Commission, the attack was pre-planned by Reyes Mena, with the approval of other military leaders. Although El Salvador's Supreme Court approved a request for his extradition from the United States in March, the process for his return has not yet progressed.
The other two convicts, Garcia and Moran, are under police surveillance in a private hospital in the capital, San Salvador. Garcia was deported from the United States in 2016 after a US court found him responsible for serious human rights violations in the early stages of the conflict between the army and the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front.
The prosecution against them resumed in 2018 after El Salvador's Supreme Court overturned a general amnesty adopted after the war, declaring it unconstitutional.