Mexican teenage hitman is jailed

27 July 2011 Last updated at 08:02 GMT Jimenez was arrested last December while trying to catch a plane to the US A Mexican judge has sentenced a US-born teenager to three years in prison for four murders, which he said he carried out on the orders of a drug gang.

Edgar Jimenez Lugo, 14 at the time of the killings, said he was under the influence of drugs and threatened by gang leaders, according to officials.

The sentence was the maximum allowed for a juvenile in the state of Morelos, where he was tried.

Jimenez was born in California, but has spent most of his life in Mexico.

The juvenile court in Morelos found the teenager guilty of killing four people, whose mutilated bodies were founding hanging from a bridge in Cuernavaca in 2010.

A court spokesman said Jimenez's three-year sentence was effective from 2 January 2010. He will be kept in a juvenile facility.

Jimenez, nicknamed El Ponchis, was arrested by the Mexican army last December. He was trying to catch a plane from Cuernavaca with two of his sisters to get back to San Diego, where his Mexican mother lives.

Intimidation

Officials say the boy confessed to working for the South Pacific drug cartel in Morelos state.

He told them he had been abducted and given drugs, and then ordered to carry out the killings.

At the time of his arrest, the Reforma newspaper quoted Edgar Jimenez as saying: "I felt bad doing it. I was forced to do it. They said they would kill me if I didn't do it.

"I only beheaded them, but never hung [bodies] from bridges, never."

Hanging bodies from bridges at busy intersections is a practice among Mexican cartels as a way to intimidate rivals.

Some 40,000 people have died in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderon began deploying troops to fight the cartels in late 2006.

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Argentine ex-army officers jailed

14 July 2011 Last updated at 22:29 GMT Thousands were killed or tortured during Argentina's Dirty War Two ex-military officers have been sentenced to life for abuses at one of Argentina's most notorious prisons run by the country's former dictatorship.

Hector Gamen and Hugo Pascarelli were convicted by a Buenos Aires court of committing crimes against humanity.

Some 2,500 political prisoners passed through "El Vesubio" jail during the military junta's war on dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s.

Survivors say few of them came out alive.

The head of the prison died in June while standing trial.

An estimated 30,000 people were kidnapped, tortured and killed in Argentina in the seven years of military rule which became known as the Dirty War.

Some leading members of the military were tried after the return to civilian rule in 1983, but then given an amnesty.

More than 20 years on, the amnesties were ruled unconstitutional, clearing the way for trials to resume.

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Colombia troops jailed for deaths

6 July 2011 Last updated at 19:27 GMT The "false positive" scandal has provoked protests in Colombia, as with this demonstration in Bogota A court in Colombia has sentenced eight soldiers to 60 years each in jail for killing four farmers and then claiming the men were left-wing guerrillas.

It is the latest prosecution in the so-called "false-positive" scandal that first erupted in 2008.

Security forces are believed to have killed thousands of civilians and passed them off as guerrillas in order to falsely inflate their success rates.

They used these tallies to claim promotion and perks such as days off.

The specific events happened in 2006 in the area of Yarumal, in the province of Antioquia.

The soldiers claimed the victims - Enrique Piedrahita, John Edison Galeano, Jesus Alberto Londono and Juan Dario Arroyave - were guerrillas killed in combat.

In a statement, Colombia's Public Prosecutor's office said the prosecutor had proved beyond reasonable doubt that "the victims were taken from their houses by force, there was no fighting, and that the men were farmers who were shot in the back".

The convicted soldiers included one officer, Luis Gabriel Rueda Acevedo.

The "false positive" scandal first hit the headlines under former President Alvaro Uribe.

There have been a number of high-profile resignations and prosecutions since.

But hundreds more cases are still being investigated.

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