Spain Drops Case Against Ex-Salvador President

Spain will not put ex-El Salvador President Alfredo Cristiani on trial over allegations he shielded the murderers of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter in 1989, a Madrid judge said on Tuesday.

However, 14 former Salvadoran army officers and soldiers will by tried by Spain's High Court over their role in the massacre, one of the most notorious in the country's 1980-92 civil war.

The High Court said the crime Cristiani had been accused of was not one of the offences committed abroad over which Spanish courts had jurisdiction. The court added that insufficient evidence had been presented against him.

Spanish judges, arguing that human rights crimes can be prosecuted anywhere, have pursued high-profile cases against rights violators who have escaped prosecution at home, including Chile's former dictator Augusto Pinochet, who narrowly avoided extradition to Spain in 2000.

The San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) and the Spanish Association for Human Rights brought the charges against Cristiani and the soldiers in November. Five of the six murdered priests were Spaniards.

In the early hours of Nov. 16, 1989, according to a U.N.-sponsored Truth Commission, a group of soldiers entered the campus of the Central American University, where Spanish-born priest Ignacio Ellacuria was rector, and made their way to its pastoral center.

They ordered Ellacuria and five other Jesuit priests to lie face down on the ground and shot them. They also killed the priests' housekeeper and her 13-year-old daughter.

The soldiers then left a note claiming the murders had been carried out by left-wing FMLN guerrillas.

In a statement, the CJA said Judge Eloy Velasco Nunez's judgment reserved the right to indict Cristiani.

"We look forward to a successful prosecution of all of those responsible for this heinous act," CJA Executive Director Pamela Merchant said in the statement.

The soldiers and army officers cannot be tried in El Salvador since they are protected by the amnesty law.

The judge asked the human rights groups to provide the addresses of the accused.

The killings, like the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the rape and murder of a group of American nuns in 1980, attracted wide international publicity and put pressure on the Salvadoran government.

After a criminal investigation, two army officers were convicted of the Jesuit murders and jailed, although they were released after the Amnesty Law was passed in 1993.