Soldier jailed over massacre

Wednesday 14 March 2012 01:00 GMT

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A former member of an elite Guatemalan military force extradited from the US in July has been sentenced to 6,060 years in prison for his role in the massacre of 101 people at the height of the civil war in 1982.

Pedro Pimentel Rios, 54, was the fifth former special forces soldier sentenced to 6,060 years or more for the massacre in the northern village of Dos Erres.

The ruling comes as Guatemala seeks to clean up atrocities from the bloody civil war between 1960 and 1996 in which nearly a quarter of a million people died or went missing. The former dictator Efrain Rios Montt went on trial for genocide in January.

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Soldier jailed over massacre

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