By IANS,
Lima (Peru) : Peru’s disgraced former president Alberto Fujimori has been suffering from cancer, his daughter and his personal physician have told media, Spain’s EFE news agency reported.
Lawmaker Keiko Fujimori told Canal N television Saturday that doctors, who operated Thursday on her father, have confirmed that the lesions they removed from his tongue were cancerous.
Alejandro Aguinaga, Fujimori’s personal physician, said tests of the removed lesion showed it was cancerous, not pre-cancerous as doctors had initially said. He said the former president has been recovering well following the surgery.
Fujimori is currently being tried for human rights violations and corruption during his presidency.
The former president is credited with defeating a brutal Maoist insurgency known as the Shining Path during his 1990-2000 rule, but has been accused of trampling on human rights in doing so.
Fujimori is on trial for several kidnappings and for the killings of 25 people by the Colina squad during his government, which collapsed in November 2000 amid a corruption scandal involving spy chief and top adviser Vladimiro Montesinos.
When the dismissal of Montesinos failed to still the growing public clamour, Fujimori fled Peru for his ancestral homeland Japan, from where he faxed his resignation as president.
Safe from extradition in Japan, which granted him asylum, the 69-year-old former president arrived in Chile unexpectedly on Nov 6, 2005, apparently with hopes of returning to Peru to run in the 2006 presidential election.
But Chilean authorities promptly arrested him on an Interpol warrant and he was extradited back to Peru in September last year.
Fujimori already has been sentenced to six years in prison for ordering an illegal search of the apartment of Montesinos’ wife and still faces two more corruption trials after the ones for murder and kidnapping.
The former president’s relatives said he would appear in court June 11 when his trial is scheduled to resume.