GUATEMALA CITY, (Reuters) – A Guatemalan court on Tuesday sentenced a former police chief to 70 years in jail for ordering the kidnapping of a university student during the country’s brutal civil war.
The landmark ruling made Pedro Garcia the highest ranking police official to be sentenced for war crimes in Guatemala and was the latest in a string of cases the government has initiated against former officials.
Garcia, arrested last year at his home southeast of the capital, was convicted of crimes against humanity and the ‘forced disappearance’ or kidnapping of engineering student Edgar Saenz, who disappeared in 1981.
Garcia, who was police chief from 1974 until 1982, faces separate murder charges in the 1980 burning of the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala, which killed 36 people including the father of Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu.
