The Conservative Party demanded Wednesday that the Prosecutor General’s Office speed up the investigation against those responsible for the 1995 murder of Conservative Party Senator Alvaro Gomez Hurtado.
The party claimed authorities have not acted promptly in seeking justice on the case.
“On various occasions our party has pleaded for the results of the investigation of this terrible crime, that has affected not only one person and one family, but rather the entire country…we insist on demanding that which the National Director of the Conservative Party has asked for in various public communications, after 16 long years since this tragedy happened on November 2, 1995,” the Conservative Party stated in their communication.
The collective insisted that the Prosecutor General reveal the state of the investigations of the Hurtado case that has yet to identify the circumstances and persons that caused the untimely death of Senator Hurtado. Conservative Party chairman, Senator Jose Dario Salazar Cruz, also asked the prosecutor to declare the murder as a crime against humanity so that the murderers would not go unpunished.
Recently, an extradited leader of the defunct Norte del Valle cartel, Hernando Gomez, alias “Rasguño,” declared that Colombian police worked with the cartel to kill Gomez Hurtado in 1995. The former drug trafficker said that the police were involved in collecting shell casings from the crime scene and replacing them with shell casings from military weapons in an effort to divert the investigation and place blame on the army. Gomez also testified that the order to kill Hurtado came from an emissary who was allegedly directed by then-President Ernesto Samper. However, both the Liberal ex-president as well as former Minister Horacio Serpa Uribe have defended Samper from accusations, with Serpa Uribe stating that it is “absolutely absurd” to assert that Samper was involved in this murder.