The BBC reports that Peru’s ex-President Alberto Fujimori has been ordered to stand trial for the 1992 killings of six farmers.
It comes just over a month after he was released from prison, where he was serving 25 years for human rights abuses and corruption.
The 79-year-old was given a pardon on health grounds but the court in the capital Lima says this does not apply to the new case.
Fujimori was president of Peru from 1990 to 2000. After faxing his resignation from Tokyo in 2000, he received citizenship from Japan, from where his parents had emigrated to Peru.
In 2005, Mr. Fujimori unexpectedly ended a self-imposed exile in Japan and traveled to Chile, apparently intending to return to Peru and try for a political comeback. But he was arrested soon after he arrived, and Peru quickly sought extradition.
Fujimori found guilty of ordering killings and kidnappings during the war with “Shinning Path” Maoist guerrillas, and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Fujimori is the first democratically-elected Latin American president to be found guilty of human rights crimes in his own country.
Fujimori was tried for ordering the 1991 killings at the Barrios Altos area of Lima, where 15 people died, and the killings at La Cantuta University in 1992, along with the kidnappings of journalist Gustavo Gorriti, a correspondent for Spanish daily El País, and businessman Samuel Dyer, who were abducted to the basement of the army’s Intelligence Service.
There were street protests in Lima last December when he was granted a pardon over health issues. Last month he was released from prison where he was serving the 25-year sentence.
Japan Times has covered Fujimori over the decades.
Cross-posted at WoW! Magazine.
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