DNA tests on traces of a substance found on seven members of the military in the Arauca department found that it was not blood from three children murdered in October, CMI reported Wednesday.
The bodies of three siblings were found with signs of torture after they disappeared in the municipality of Tame.
Sixty soldiers from the 5th Mobile Brigade are under investigation and are being questioned in the department capital Arauca.
On November 2 the army announced the suspension of seven army officers in connection with the crime.
The investigation team had found traces of human secretions on items belonging to the soldiers, but it was later determined that the traces were the soldiers’ own sweat.
The father of the killed minors, Jose Alvaro Torres, said in an official statement that he will not forgive or forget what happened to his children and that he demands justice.
Torres said that “it is false that an army general in a newspaper claims that foreign organizations have controlled and manipulated me in order to denounce and tarnish the name of the brigade. Is it not correct that with the murder the army themselves have tarnished the name of their brigade?”
He also denounced suggestions that his daughter, whose body showed signs of rape, had consensual sex and said “if that was the case, would she then also have agreed to her own murder and the murder of her two little brothers, who were my dear children?”
