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This Tuesday, the NGO released a forensic report that concluded that the inmates who died between the night of March 21 and the early morning of March 22 they have gunshot wounds “inflicted with intent to kill”.
For months, the relatives of the dead have claimed that Inpec custodians went overboard that night to control the riot and asked the authorities to investigate.
First, HRW confirmed that As of November 13, 2020, the Attorney General’s Office had not charged anyone for the deaths and injuries that occurred in the revolt.
However, what most caught the attention of the international human rights organization was that so far “the Attorney General’s Office has not made significant progress either” and that this could be worse in a few months.
So far, the only thing that the Public Ministry has done, according to an official told HRW, is to investigate without identifying any custodian allegedly responsible for the deaths because “the guards did not keep a record of which weapon each agent used on the day of the riots. ”.
But in addition, the NGO recalled that after the riot, the then Minister of Justice Margarita Cabello stated that the events occurred while the prison guards prevented a “criminal escape plan”, but also outlined other information in the report:
“On March 23, the Colombian media La Nueva Prensa published an audio recording of what appears to be a meeting between Cabello and authorities from the National Penitentiary and Prison Institute (Inpec) after the riots. Cabello is heard saying that she ‘feels proud’ and ‘likes it'[ce] very much ‘to the prison guards for having prevented the escape “.
The NGO was struck by those words, precisely because of the lives that were lost that day, and even the director for the Americas of HRW, said:
“It is one thing to prevent detainees from escaping and quite another to carry out extrajudicial executions of detainees. The Colombian authorities have the obligation to guarantee a serious and effective investigation to determine what happened in La Modelo ”.
And that investigation is precisely what worries the organization, taking into account that last August, more early than normal, Cabello was elected as the new attorney general and will be the head of the disciplinary processes for officials who could be involved in what they considered “intentional deaths” in La Modelo.
Given this situation, HRW assured that since January, when Cabello assumes his new functions, “there are valid reasons to fear that there is a conflict of interest that limits the possibilities of a timely, effective and independent investigation into the events in La Modelo, given that seems to have a formed opinion about what happened “.
For this reason, he urged the Colombian justice system to establish “safeguards to ensure” that when Cabello is Attorney General, the investigation is “carried out independently and exhaustively in order to identify those who may have committed crimes”.
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