A police colonel suspected of having killed three young people in Colombia was arrested this Saturday on his return from Mexico, where he turned himself in the day before at the Colombian consulate, authorities reported.
Officer Benjamín Núñez landed under guard on a commercial flight and was "left at disposal" of the prosecution for "the legalization of his capture"said Migration Colombia in a message to the media.
Núñez, former police commander in the department of Sucre (north), is accused of the murder of Jesús Díaz (18 years old), José Arévalo (22) and Carlos Ibáñez (26).
The young people were shot on July 25 in the municipality of Chocó, Sucre, and presented as drug traffickers who had fallen in combat.
The three victims had been detained at a police checkpoint and hours later the uniformed men took them to the hospital with multiple shots and signs of torture, according to the story of relatives.
In photographs broadcast in local media, the three are seen alive in the middle of a road, one standing, another kneeling and another lying down, surrounded by police.
Together with Núñez, another ten uniformed men are detained for the homicide. The colonel would have shot at the young people, according to the police investigation.
The police commander, General Henry Sanabria, reported this Saturday that the authorities expanded the investigation to determine if "other soldiers participated in these events" covering up those directly responsible.
The death of the young men evoked the so-called false positives, a lurid military practice in which the Army murdered 6,402 civilians and presented them as rebels killed in combat to inflate their results in the fight against the guerrillas between 2002 and 2008.
President Gustavo Petro plans to carry out a profound reform of the police, questioned by the bloody repression during the massive anti-government protests in 2021.