Velásquez is waiting in a prosecutor’s pre-trial detention center for a judge to order his transfer to a prison, where he will remain until the judiciary convicts him of crimes against humanity.
He was already on trial and awaiting sentencing, scheduled for November 19, 2013, for serious human rights violations, but he did not attend the hearing and was awaiting sentencing as he had fled to the United States .
The soldier is identified as one of the participants in the La Cantuta massacre, committed by the Colina Group, an illegal military unit created under the government of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) and managed by the ruler to exterminate terrorist suspects
In that operation, the group kidnapped, tortured and executed nine students and a professor from the Pedagogical University known as La Cantuta, for which prosecutors sought a 25-year prison sentence for Velásquez.
Former President Fujimori is serving a similar sentence as the direct perpetrator of this massacre and the massacre of Barrios Altos, a popular neighborhood where the group murdered 15 innocent civilians, including a child.
The same sentence was handed down to Fujimori’s adviser Vladimiro Montesinos – founder of the Colina Group and link between him and the former president – and both face another trial over the Santa massacre of nine farm workers in a labor dispute with a government businessman friend .
Extradited Velásquez was only added to the Interior Department’s rewards program in 2018, which offered 20,000 soles ($5,400) for information leading to his arrest.
What worked was the National Police alert to Interpol, an international cooperation mechanism, which reported the February 2022 arrest of Velásquez in the US city of New York.
Then the extradition procedure began, which was welcomed by the organizations in Peru, including the Association for Human Rights (Aprodeh), which stated that the fugitive was not found through the actions of the Peruvian police, but through the international mechanism mentioned above.
“To date, dozens of refugees have been tried and convicted of serious human rights violations. We call on the Peruvian National Police to act expeditiously on extradition requests,” Aprodeh said after Velásquez’s extradition.
rgh/mrs