Eight soldiers arrested for ‘false positives’ in the town of Soacha were indicted Friday.
Judge Jorge Enrique Forero indicted the eight men for the murder of eight civilians that they had presented as
guerrillas killed in combat.
The eight civilians had all disappeared from Soacha, a town close to Colombia’s
capital Bogotá.
Extrajudicial executions
of civilians by soldiers or police, who then report the victims as
rebels killed in combat, are known in Colombia as “false positives.”
The
phenomenon of extrajudicial executions came to light after the discovery of mass graves in Ocaña, close to the
Venezuelan border, which held the remains of the civilians from Ochoa, reported by the
military as “killed in combat.”
This case
led to the uncovering of many similar incidents in other parts of the
country.
