By IANS/EFE,
Bogota : A criminal court judge was murdered outside the building where he lived in Bogota by gunmen riding a motorcycle, Colombian police said.
Jose Fernando Patino was shot three times Monday outside the building in north Bogota and was pronounced dead at the scene, the Metropolitan Police said.
The judge recently served in Soacha, a city near the capital, and had been transferred to Fusagasuga, another city in central Colombia.
Patino did not handle any of the cases involving the extralegal executions of young men in Soacha, a judicial official in the Bogota suburb told EFE.
The so-called “Soacha Case” involves about 20 young men lured for a supposed job but then later allegedly slain by Colombian army soldiers and presented as guerrillas killed in combat.
In January, Jose Armando Salamanca Gutierrez was indicted on charges of “simple aggravated kidnapping associated with aggravated homicide” in two of the killings, the attorney general’s Office said.
Salamanca was indicted by the human rights and international humanitarian law prosecutor handling the case in the northern city of Barranquilla.
Salamanca recruited Carlos Augusto Gonzalez Cortes and Giovanny Jose Cortes Vega with “false work promises” and took them to a rural area of the Caribbean province of La Guajira known as Conejo, the AG’s office said.
Army soldiers reported that both men had been killed in combat Nov 23, 2006, the AG’s office said, adding that it determined “through technical analysis” that there had been no armed clash and that “neither Gonzalez Cortes nor Cortes Vega were insurgents”.
The scandal of the “false positives” – civilians executed by the army and then presented as rebels killed in combat – erupted in October 2008 with the discovery in northeastern Colombia of the bodies of a score of young men who had disappeared from Soacha, a poor town on the outskirts of Bogota.
The men had been buried in common graves as if they were guerrillas killed in combat.
It emerged that civilian accomplices lured the victims away from Soacha with promises of employment and that the soldiers who claimed credit for the “kills” received weekend passes and other benefits.
Prosecutors are investigating some 2,000 “false positives” cases and have implicated approximately 500 army soldiers as suspects.