Spanish justice announced on Wednesday June 29 that it had closed a complaint against Colombian President Gustavo Petro, accused of being involved in the kidnapping of a television presenter in 1981, when the head of state was an activist. in a guerrilla.
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Elected ten days ago as head of Colombia, Gustavo Petro was once an activist in the April 19 Movement (M-19), a far-left guerrilla that led the armed struggle against the Colombian state until the signing of a peace agreement in 1990. The M-19 kidnapped Fernando Gonzalez Pacheco, journalist and Colombian television host, in 1981, before releasing him a few days later. The journalist died in 2014. The magistrates of the National Audience, Madrid’s high court competent to decide this kind of complex case, considered that they were not competent in the matter, they explain in a judicial document consulted by AFP. They thus agreed with the prosecution, which had appealed the admissibility of this complaint a few weeks ago.
According to the decision dated June 24 but revealed on Wednesday, the court said “surprised“that this complaint has been deemed admissible insofar as it was filed by”someone who is not the victim of the facts, concerning facts that took place in Colombia and attributed to people who are not Spanish and do not usually live in Spain“. Since the complaint does not emanate from the prosecution or from a victim, it does not meet the criteria for establishing universal justice. The court is therefore not competent in the matter, even if the victim, now deceased, is of Spanish nationality, an argument which had allowed a judge to admit this complaint at first.
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The complaint was filed in March by François Roger Cavard, a lawyer who unsuccessfully tried to have Gustavo Petro’s candidacy canceled, claiming that he had not benefited from the amnesty for crimes committed by the M-19 . In his complaint before the National Audience, Cavard accuses Petro of crimes against humanity and of having been “one of the highest officialsof M-19. The prosecution also considered that the complaint did not bring “sufficient informationneither on the Spanish nationality of González Pacheco nor on theexact circumstancesof events that occurred in 1981.
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