COLOMBIAN SOLDIERS CONVICTED IN MASSACRE

They're Found to Have Slaughtered 10 Police Officers on the Orders of
Drug Traffickers in May 2006.

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA -- A Colombian army colonel and 14 soldiers were
convicted Monday of killing members of an elite, U.S.-trained
counter- narcotics police squad on the orders of drug traffickers,
one of the most sordid of several recent cases of alleged corruption
in the armed forces.

A judge in Cali found Col. Bayron Carvajal and the soldiers guilty of
aggravated homicide in the slaughter of 10 police officers and an
informant in a May 2006 ambush outside a rural nursing home near
Cali. Sentences will be imposed in two weeks.

The massacre was just one of several scandals over the last two years
that have tarnished this country's armed forces and raised questions
about the U.S.-sponsored program called Plan Colombia that in 2000
began funneling millions of dollars in aid here.

Since 2006, high-ranking military officers are alleged to have sold
secrets to drug traffickers to help them elude capture, and to have
planted fake bombs to gain career advancement. A recent report by
human rights groups found that extrajudicial killings by the army
have increased since the early years of Plan Colombia.

Carvajal maintained his innocence throughout the trial, saying he and
his troops thought the police were drug traffickers. More than 100
witnesses were called to testify, some of whom linked Carvajal to
both leftist guerrillas and drug gangs.

Defense attorneys said the legal process was tainted by public
statements from the attorney general and President Alvaro Uribe that
the soldiers had murdered the police.

The soldiers lay in wait, then fired hundreds of rounds and threw
several grenades at the police unit as it was about to launch an
operation to recover 220 pounds of cocaine that a tipster had said
was stashed inside a psychiatric facility in the town of Jamundi.

Six police officers were found to have been shot at close range. None
of the soldiers were wounded.

No drugs were found, and the informant -- who prosecutors said spoke
by phone with Carvajal shortly before the attack -- was killed as well.

The preponderance of Plan Colombia aid, which in recent years has
averaged more than $650 million a year, has gone to expand, equip and
train Colombia's military and national police. Congress was assured
that human rights abuses and corruption in the Colombian armed forces
would decline as a result of U.S. training.