BOGOTA -- Hundreds of innocent civilians have been slain by Colombian soldiers and falsely identified as guerrillas killed in combat as part of a "more or less" systematic practice by "significant elements" of the military, a U.N. human-rights investigator said Thursday.
Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, gestures during a news conference in Bogota.
After a 10-day visit interviewing more than 100 witnesses and survivors, special envoy Philip Alston told reporters he found nothing to indicate that such extra-judicial killings were state policy or that President Alvaro Uribe and his defense ministers knew of them.
However, the Australian investigator said it was "unsustainable" for officials in Mr. Uribe's government to argue that the killings were carried out "on a small scale by a few bad apples." The vast majority of the slayings occurred after Mr. Uribe's 2002 election.
Colombia's government, which under Mr. Uribe has put leftist rebels on the defensive and seriously curbed kidnapping and murder with the help of more than $4 billion in U.S. aid, said it would respond quickly.
Mr. Alston said he would issue a full report in four to five months.
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