Colombian human rights committee pleads for bilateral ceasefire after new alleged ‘false positive’
Colombian human rights committee pleads for bilateral ceasefire after new alleged ‘false positive’
Aug 11, 2014 posted by Nicolas Bedoya
A slain 17-year-old mother recently presented by the Armed Forces as a “guerrilla killed in combat” in northern Colombia may in fact have been an innocent civilian, according to a local human rights group report.
The Human Rights Committee of San Jose de Apartado, a town in the northern Uraba region, sent a letter to President Juan Manuel Santos and various other government officials and NGOs last Friday denouncing what it has characterized as the latest “false positive” killing, a term used to describe extrajudicial executions perpetrated by the military.
In the military’s original statement, the incident was described as a “successfull operation” against the 58th Front of the FARC, Colombia’s largest rebel group, that prevented a “terrorist act” allegedly being planned by the group and “resulted in the deaths of two guerrillas, one man and one woman, who still haven’t been identified.”
The human rights version acknowledges that troops from the Army’s Seventh Division were indeed firing at supposed guerrillas, as the military statement claims. Yerit Magali Muñoz, however, “was not a combatant” and “was not a member of any armed group,” the human rights report emphasizes repeatedly.
More:
http://colombiareports.co/colombias-human-rights-group-denounce-false-positive/