LIMA (Reuters) – A Peruvian court granted parole on Friday to US citizen Lori Berenson after she served some 15 years of a 20-year sentence for collaborating with leftist insurgents.
Berenson, who will turn 41 next week, was freed in May but sent back to jail in August when a panel of judges ruled the release of the American was flawed because police had failed to confirm where she would be living in Lima while on parole.
A New York native who studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before becoming involved in social justice issues in Latin America, Berenson was arrested on a bus in Peru in 1995 and charged with belonging to the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or MRTA, an urban guerrilla group.
In a rare public statement, Berenson publicly apologized in August for working with the Marxist guerrilla movement.
“Yes, I collaborated with the MRTA. I was never a leader or a militant. I never participated in violent or bloody acts. I never killed anybody,” she said at the time.
The issue of her release been controversial in Peru, a country still traumatized by violent conflict that killed some 70,000 people.
