Colombia’s State Council gave the order to compensate a former military leader for spending four years in prison over paramilitary links even though he cooperated with the authorities, according to national media on Wednesday.
The former major in Colombia’s armed forces, Oscar de Jesus, was sentenced to eight years in jail over his involvement in paramilitary groups training with the Israeli mercenary Yair Klein in the 1990s.
Jesus ended up serving four of the 8 year sentence, even though he cooperated with authorities by sharing delicate information about the links between military, paramilitary groups and their training by the Israeli mercenary.
In 2001, he was released from prison after Colombia’s Supreme Court ruled that the authorities did not adequately evaluate the information he shared with the authorities, for which he should have been spared his jail sentence.
Now the State Council ordered to pay Jesus a compensation for the “moral damages” he had to endure during his unjustified time spent in jail.
Yair Klein is an Israeli mercenary suspected of training the death squads of the now defunct AUC paramilitary group, as well as militias working for Pablo Escobar’s infamous Medellin drug cartel.
He was convicted in absentia in a Colombian court in 2001 on charges of conspiracy and the illegal formation of a paramilitary group, for which he was sentenced to ten years in jail.
MORE: Israeli mercenary Yair Klein trained paramilitary ‘with the approval of the Colombian authorities’
Sources
Ordenan indemnizar a militar que informó sobre entrenamientos de Yair Klein (Caracol Radio)
Ordenan indemnizar a militar que dio a conocer entrenamientos de Yair Klein (El Colombiano)