A El Salvadoran court ordered the arrest of the former President of El Salvador Alfredo Cristiani for the alleged concealment of those responsible for the El Mozote massacre, which occurred in December 1981 during Civil War which bled the Central American country for 12 years.

In an order published this Friday by the Investigative Court of San Francisco Gotera, in the northeast of the country, 76-year-old Cristiani is included among 10 people who could put forward a law on general amnesty was approved in 1993 to exonerate individuals involved in war crimes.

The court document, which also declared the El Mozote massacre a “crime against humanity”, ordered the arrest of the former president and four other defendants who could formed the board of directors of the unicameral Congressin the period 1991-1994.

Cristiani was the president who signed peace agreements held on January 16, 1992 in Mexico City, ending a conflict that claimed the lives of about 75 thousand people.

You might be interested > El Salvador prosecutors accuse former President Alfredo Cristiani of authorizing the massacre of Jesuits

He was also the first of four presidents elected under the banner of the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), which He governed El Salvador from 1989 to 2009.

The case of the El Mozote massacre, which killed more than a thousand peasants during a four-day counter-insurgency military operation, was reopened in October 2016. after the amnesty law was declared unconstitutionalin July of the same year.

In total, the court asks to capture twenty people, among them former generals José Guillermo García and Juan Rafael Bustillo, former defense minister and former air force commander respectively, during the period of the massacre. (RTS)