Peru leader quizzed over killings

BBC

The killings happened during Mr Garcia's first term as president

Peruvian President Alan Garcia has denied political responsibility for the killing of dozens of prisoners during a jail riot more than two decades ago.

Over 100 suspected leftist guerrillas died at El Fronton island prison near the capital, Lima, after marines were sent to put down their uprising.

The killings happened in 1986, during Mr Garcia's first term in office.

Mr Garcia, who was elected president for a second time in July 2006, has already been cleared of any wrongdoing.

In 2004 Peru's highest court ordered a judicial investigation into the killings that took place when Peruvian security forces stormed the prison on 19 July 1986.

Mr Garcia, appearing as a witness, told the hearing he did not have any knowledge of the operation at the time.

"I think it's an issue that is almost 21 years old and about which I have already given evidence 19 times and for which I have been exonerated numerous times," he told journalists after his testimony.

But a lawyer for the victims' families, Carlos Rivera, said evidence showed that political and legal responsibility for the inmates' deaths lay with Mr Garcia and other top officials.

And, says the BBC's Dan Collyns in Lima, some of the military chiefs involved in the operation say the president was given regular updates on the events at the prison.

The killings came during a period in which Mr Garcia was facing a brutal insurgency led by the Maoist Shining Path rebel group.