A court in El Salvador has sentenced two members of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) to between 269 and 325 years in prison for their responsibility in the murder of seven people, including four soldiers, in a 2016 attack in the town of Ilopango, the Salvadoran Attorney General’s Office has confirmed.
«After a well-formulated investigation and with irrefutable evidence, the Prosecutor’s Office achieved sentences of 325 and 269 years in prison for two MS-13 gang members who participated in the murder of 7 victims, among them, four soldiers killed in 2016, in the Vista al Lago colony, Ilopango,» the agency said through a statement published on its website.
Thus, it has detailed that Henry Alonso Romero Rosales has been sentenced to 325 years in prison, while Miguel Antonio Diaz Saravia has been sentenced to 269 years in prison, while stressing that both were arrested during the «regime of exception» decreed by the Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele, due to the increase of insecurity in the Central American country.
The Attorney General’s Office has detailed that the four murdered soldiers were on their way to their military detachment when «they boarded the wrong bus and were intercepted by gang members, who forced them to leave the transport unit, deprived them of their freedom and then killed them. «Their bodies were buried in clandestine graves,» he said.
Bukele announced at the end of November the implementation of «Phase 5» of his Territorial Control Plan to fight gangs, which will allow the country’s Armed Forces to find and «extract» alleged criminals in large cities. The president’s plan is to export nationwide military encirclements like the one carried out in the town of Comasagua, population 15,000, but this time in larger cities and municipalities.
The Salvadoran president, who will run for reelection in 2024, has defended the state of exception as a key instrument of his security plan, in the face of human rights organizations, which question the excessive powers granted by this regime to the security forces.
