Many of the accusations of extrajudicial executions by the security
forces are false, Colombian President Álvaro Uribe said Monday.
According to the President, in only 22 of many investigated cases, members of the security forces can be held responsible for the murder on civilians to up the guerrilla body count.
The accusations of these human rights violations are abused to paralyze the security forces, Uribe added.
“The Armed Forces of Colombia, in this process of being effective and transparent, correct willfully any deficiency, but will not accept ‘false positives’ and will also not allow ‘false accusation’ make things more complex,” Uribe said on a visit to Norte de Santander.
“We are the first to find out there are no ‘false positives’ and that there is full transparency, but we also have to be the first to denounce that many people, using ‘false positives’ havemade false accusations to try to paralyze the strength of the security forces against the terrorists,” the President added.
Colombia’s Prosecutor General is currently investigating at least 700 suspicious deaths of civilians that ended up on lists of guerrillas kileld in combat. The UN has qualified the extrajudicial killings as “widespread and systematic”.