Colombia to pay reparations to man convicted of 1986 newspaper assassination

Colombia to pay reparations to man convicted of 1986 newspaper assassination
Feb 21, 2014 posted by Alexandra Jolly

Colombia to pay reparations to man convicted of 1986 newspaper assassination

The Colombian government will pay a reported $500,000 in reparations to a former cartel operative wrongly convicted of a high-profile 1980s murder, according to national media sources.
Pablo Enrique Zamora was one of two men found guilty of the 1986 assassination of Guillermo Cano, the Director of the El Espectador newspaper at the time, a prominent news organization that ran afoul of Colombia’s Medellin Cartel. On Thursday, the Colombian State Council awarded the former convict payment in exchange for time spent in prison, after the country’s Supreme Court ruled he was convicted on insufficient evidence.

Cano was murdered in front of the El Espectador offices in Bogota by two hitmen at the order of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. The newspaper had been publishing articles critical of the narcotics trade’s influence over Colombian politics, and those same offices were later destroyed in a car bombing three years later.

~snip~

According to the International Press Institute, Cano’s murder investigation took nine years and was fraught with irregularities. The Medellin Cartel infiltrated the judiciary, bribing judges, court officials and jurors. One judge looking into the matter was murdered and another forced to flee the country.

Furthermore, the hit men who were suspected of having killed Cano, Alvaro García Saldarriaga and Luis Eduardo Osorio, were themselves murdered, in a supposed effort to erase any traces of the crime.

More:
http://colombiareports.co/1-billion-pesos-compensation-wrongly-convicted-cano-assasin/