MADRID (Reuters) – Spain’s High Court on Friday sentenced a former El Salvadoran army colonel to 133 years in prison for the murder of five Spanish Jesuit priests in 1989 during the Central American country’s civil war.
In 2017, the United States deported Colonel Inocente Orlando Montano Morales, now 77, to Spain, where was arrested and put on trial for murder and crimes against humanity.
The Spanish government had indicted 20 former Salvadoran army officers for the killings of the priests, their housekeeper and her daughter. One of the priests, Father Ignacio Ellacuria, was a prominent critic of the U.S.-backed right-wing government.
Their massacre was one of the most notorious acts of a decade-long civil war during which 75,000 people were killed and 8,000 went missing.
The court said Montano Morales was guilty of “murder of terrorist nature.”
(Reporting by Nathan Allen and Andrei Khalip; Editing by Ingrid Melander)
