Guatemala police arrested in politicians' killings
Source: Reuters
By Mica Rosenberg GUATEMALA CITY, Feb 22 (Reuters) - Four Guatemalan policemen were arrested on Thursday in the murder of three Salvadoran politicians after being linked to the crime by a global positioning system in their vehicle, the government said. Luis Herrera, the head of a special police unit charged with investigating organized crime, was captured after the GPS receiver in his police truck revealed he had been at the scene of the kidnapping and the site where the bodies were found, authorities told reporters. Herrera, along with three men from his unit, was also filmed by traffic cameras as he intercepted a car carrying the three members of the Guatemala-based Central American regional parliament and their driver, the officials added. The detained policemen "obviously" did not know the GPS was in their vehicle when they carried out the killings, Guatemalan police chief Erwin Sperisen said. GPS receivers calculate their position in relation to orbiting satellites. GPS units are used frequently for navigation and to prevent vehicle theft. Police are looking for two more agents believed to be part of Herrera's group, which is accused of kidnapping and killing the three congressmen along with their driver. The murdered politicians, Eduardo D'Aubuisson, William Pichinte and Jose Ramon Gonzalez, belonged to El Salvador's ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance party, known as ARENA. Eduardo D'Aubuisson was the son of the party's founder, Roberto D'Aubuisson, accused of heading death squads during the 1980s civil war. The elder D'Aubuisson, who died in 1992, was found by a U.N.-backed truth commission to have ordered the 1980 assassination of Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero. The GPS in the agents' truck tracked the vehicle to the abandoned dirt track 22 miles (36 km) outside the capital, Guatemala City, where the four were shot with automatic weapons, doused with fuel and set ablaze, authorities said. Both the Guatemalan national police and the regional parliament have been mired in drug-trafficking scandals in recent years, with some congressmen accused of using their official status to smuggle narcotics. The two heads of Guatemala's top anti-drug unit were convicted in the United States last year of trafficking cocaine. "It is clear that the police are infiltrated by organized crime," said the head of the president's human rights office, Frank La Rue. "These are people dedicated not only to drug trafficking, but trafficking of arms, explosives and even children." Over 75 percent of the cocaine smuggled from Colombia to the United States passes through Central America. Interior Minister Carlos Vielmann said the arrests were a sign of Guatemala's dedication to cleaning up corrupt institutions. He said more than 250 corrupt officers had been prosecuted under the current government.
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