Salvador priests' suspected killer found

Published: Aug. 17, 2011 at 3:12 PM


EVERETT, Mass., Aug. 17 (UPI) -- A human rights group says a former Salvadoran military officer accused in the 1989 killing of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador has been found in Massachusetts.

Inocente Orlando Montano has been living in an apartment in Everett, Mass., for two decades under his own name, the Center for Justice and Accountability in San Francisco said, The Boston Globe reported Wednesday.

Montano, a former Salvadoran army colonel, is one of 20 former military officers charged in a May indictment in Spain with conspiring to kill the priests, their housekeeper and her 16-year-old daughter.

The victims were executed by a unit of the Salvadoran military after being taken from their beds at night on the campus of Central American University in San Salvador.

Most of the former military officers have never been brought to justice, the Globe said.

The newspaper said a man who answered the door at Montano's apartment said he would give him a message, which was not returned, and the next day, Montano's name had been removed from his mailbox. Nobody answered the door the past several days, and neighbors said they did not know him, the Globe said.

In 1993, a United Nations commission identified Montano as a top leader at a meeting to plan the assassination of the Rev. Ignacio Ellacuria, the university's rector, suspected by the government of supporting leftist rebels.

"I find it unbelievable and unconscionable that somebody involved in this crime is in the United States," said U.S. Rep. James McGovern, a Worcester Democrat who helped investigate the priests' killings 20 years ago.


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