Jailed U.S. citizen Berenson may be freed in Peru [View All]

Jailed U.S. citizen Berenson may be freed in Peru
LIMA
Tue May 25, 2010 1:25pm EDT

(Reuters) - Lori Berenson, a U.S. citizen serving a 20-year sentence in Peru for aiding leftist guerrillas, could be granted parole on Tuesday after some 15 years in prison and deported, an official at the country's justice ministry said. Berenson, 40, a New Yorker who studied at the elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving to Latin America as a human rights activist, would be freed a year after giving birth to a baby boy, Salvador. Berenson became eligible for parole this year after serving most of her sentence.

Her husband, Anibal Apari Sanchez, a former member of the radical Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or MRTA, is now a lawyer and represented her in the parole hearing. Berenson married Apari in 2003 and inmates in Peru are allowed conjugal visits.

Though the justice ministry said it would quickly file to deport Berenson if the judge grants her parole, Peru's human rights agency, the Defensoria del Pueblo, said there would be no legal basis for forcing her to leave the country.

She was arrested on a bus in 1995 on charges of being a leader of the MRTA, a leftist insurgency that was active in Peru in the 1980s and 1990s. She has denied being part of the MRTA. A "faceless," or anonymous, military court jailed her for life, but under pressure from the United States, a civilian court retried her and sentenced her to 20 years.

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