* Guatemala police archives could prompt civil war charges

* Official human rights ombudsman discloses contents

* The files are the latest fallout from 1960-1996 conflict (Adds vice president quotes, detail)

By Sarah Grainger

GUATEMALA CITY, March 24 (Reuters) - Information long hidden in police archives covered with mold and bat droppings could implicate hundreds of former officers accused of killing students and leftists during Guatemala's 36-year civil war, human rights activists said on Tuesday.

Sergio Morales, the Guatemalan government's human rights ombudsman, released the first report on Tuesday on the contents of 80 million documents unearthed four years ago that dated from the 1960-1996 conflict.

Activists hope information from the archives will lead authorities to arrest hundreds of former police officers who may be implicated in crimes committed during a civil war in which around 250,000 people were killed or disappeared.

"We have to know the truth, not because we want revenge, but so we don't repeat errors made by ourselves or others," Vice President Rafael Espada said during the release of the report as some among a crowd of hundreds shouted "we want justice".

Two former members of a police unit linked to death squads that operated during the civil war were detained this month based on evidence from the archive.

Human rights workers discovered the dusty floor-to-ceiling stacks of papers in 2005 when they went into a rat-infested munitions depot in Guatemala City to investigate complaints by nearby residents about old explosives stored there.

The government gave the human rights ombudsman permission to investigate the archives from a civil war-era police force so linked to repression and disappearances that it was dissolved in 1997 after leftist guerrillas and security forces signed a peace agreement.

Archivists have cleaned, scanned and filed some 11 million documents, scouring them for information from the conflict.

Scanned images of 7 million documents from the archive will be available to the public free of charge from Wednesday so that the relatives of victims can try to find out what happened to their loved ones.

SAD MEMORIES

Bitterness runs deep among Guatemalan families who have never found out what happened to relatives who disappeared. Few former officers have been convicted for civil war crimes.

The arrest of the two former officers this month was linked to the case of student Fernando Garcia, who was shot on his way to work in 1984, taken to a police hospital and never seen again.

The archive "restores a part of the truth because a lot of people said we lied (about his disappearance), but here we have the proof," Garcia's widow Nineth Montenegro, now a congresswoman, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Using archives to prosecute human rights abuses is still difficult in a country where former dictator Efrain Rios Montt serves as a member of Congress while being tried for genocide in both Guatemala and Spain.

The rights ombudsman has complained that several investigators in the Garcia case have been threatened and one was assaulted after the arrests of the two former officers. (Editing by Mohammad Zargham)

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