A Colombian prosecutor has equated the Supreme Court’s decision to rule the “Raul Reyes” files inadmissible to “high treason,” after imprisoned Professor Miguel Angel Beltran was acquitted following three years in detention, El Espectador reported Tuesday.
Prosecutor Ricardo Bejarano criticized the decision, stating that “In my respectful judgment, the Prosecutor General’s Office considers, your honor, that it is a decision skewed from reality; it is a decision that constitutes high treason against the country.”
The Supreme Court ruled the files, seized during the 2008 raid into Ecuador that killed leader “Raul Reyes,” as legally inadmissible on May 18, during the “FARC-politics” case against former Socialist Congressman Wilson Borja.
Professor Beltran, meanwhile, who had been imprisoned for three years without facing trial, was subsequently acquitted on June 4 as a result of the ruling. He had been accused of representing and recruiting for the FARC from his university in Mexico.
Bejarano, a prosecutor with the National Antiterrorism Unit, claimed that the court had “usurped the functions of the international tribunal, which alone was competent to judge in this regard.”
Bejarano said that Professor Beltran was being tried for collaborating with “a terrorist organization” like the FARC, not for his critical views against the Colombian state.
The Supreme Court’s ruling over the “Raul Reyes” files was based upon the fact that Colombian authorities did not follow international protocol upon collecting the evidence. There have been further criticisms that the evidence found on the files is difficult to verify given that the “emails” had been transferred to Word documents and thus did not have traceable IP addresses, something which also made it impossible to identify Beltran as his alleged alias, “Jaime Cienfuegos,” without reasonable doubt.
