Peru torture victims said buried in secret graves

LIMA, Peru, March 4 (Reuters) - Alleged terrorists were tortured, murdered and buried in secret graves in a vegetable patch in the grounds of Peru's army headquarters under the rule of former President Alberto Fujimori, a former member of an army death squad was quoted on Monday as saying. 

Intelligence agents suspected of leaking information to the media suffered the same fate and some had their bodies dumped on a beach, according to a former member of the Grupo Colina death squad which carried out two of Peru's most notorious human rights abuses a decade ago. 

The grisly allegations came after reports that a furnace in the army headquarters was used to burn bodies. 

La Republica newspaper said the Grupo Colina member, who was also an army intelligence agent and is now collaborating with magistrates, made the allegations to a congressional panel investigating jailed ex-spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos, the Fujimori top aide who ran Peru's feared intelligence services. 

Quoting from his testimony to the commission, the paper cited the man dubbed "Witness One" as saying alleged leftist rebels were killed after being interrogated. Peru was wracked by 15 years of war involving the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) groups and the armed forces. 

"They were eliminated ... in the early hours and taken to the back of the army intelligence service, next to a soccer pitch. They called it the allotment, because they grew carrots and things there. That's where they buried them," he said. 

La Republica said he alleged that intelligence agents suspected of leaking information to the media were also killed. Some were buried in the "allotment" of the army headquarters, better known as the "Pentagonito" or "Little Pentagon," and the bodies of others were abandoned on a beach south of Lima. 

Anel Townsend, head of the commission investigating Montesinos, was not immediately available for comment. A commission spokesman confirmed the existence of a "Witness One" but declined to comment on what his testimony contained. 

'MANY MORE CRIMES' 

La Republica said the witness had given names and dates of alleged killings but did not specify how many there had been. 

The Grupo Colina death squad, which Fujimori and Montesinos are charged with sanctioning, was responsible for the murder of 15 party-goers, among them an 8-year-old boy, in the Barrios Altos district of Lima in 1991 and the 1992 kidnap and murder of nine students and a professor from La Cantuta university. 

La Republica quoted the witness as saying that Grupo Colina head Santiago Martin Rivas, who is still on the run, had said that there were "many more crimes that people still don't know about." 

Fujimori's 1990-2000 rule gave Peru one of Latin America's worst rights records. Fired in 2000 amid a corruption scandal sparked by Montesinos, Fujimori is in self-exile in Japan. 

Montesinos was revealed in scores of secretly taped videos to have bribed Peru's courts, Congress, media and military for years to keep the former president in power. 

Fujimori says he is innocent of the corruption and rights abuse charges for which Peru wants to extradite him. Montesinos, captured last June, is in a top security jail awaiting trial on a host of similar charges. He has admitted involvement in corruption but denies human rights abuses. 

The allegations of secret graves came after Townsend said on Friday that witnesses had told her commission a secret incinerator, discovered last month in a sub-basement at the "Little Pentagon," may have been used to burn bodies, including perhaps those of the La Cantuta victims before their burial. 

The army intelligence service gained particular notoriety for two grim incidents in 1997: the murder of agent Mariella Barreto, whose body was decapitated and dumped after she allegedly tipped off the press about where the La Cantuta victims were buried; and the torture of agent Leonor La Rosa by her colleagues who also suspected her of leaking secrets.

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