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LIMA - Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, on trial for ordering suspected leftists murdered, proclaimed his innocence yesterday, saying he saved Peru from Maoist rebels.
"I reject the charges entirely. I'm innocent," Fujimori shouted angrily while pointing at a panel of three Supreme Court judges. A judge told the normally composed Fujimori to calm down.
"As a result of my government the human rights of 25 million Peruvians are respected," Fujimori yelled. "If there were exceptions, I condemn them, but I didn't not order them."
Fujimori, 69, is accused of sending a military death squad to carry out the La Cantuta massacre, in which ten people were snatched from a university and buried in a shallow grave in 1992 for allegedly collaborating with leftists.
At the time, the Maoist insurgency known as the Shining Path was trying to take over the Andean country.
Fujimori is also being tried for two kidnappings and the Barrios Altos murders in 1991, when 15 people were gunned down at a family barbecue, among them an eight-year-old boy.
He faces up to 30 years in prison and US$33 ($42.9) million in fines. Peru's Supreme Court is hearing the case at a police barracks where Fujimori is being held.
Human rights activists view the televised trial as a turning point in a country long hobbled by a weak judicial system, impunity for the powerful, and painful memories of a civil war that killed tens of thousands of people.
Prosecutors rejected Fujimori's legal arguments that he was not in charge of the Colina military's counter-insurgency team that led the massacres.
"There was a clear chain of command from Fujimori to the executioners of the Colina group, whose central mission was the physical elimination of presumed subversives," said government prosecutor Jose Antonio Pelaez.
Outside the courtroom, supporters and critics rallied and riot police scuffled with both sides to prevent clashes.
"Trial and punishment for Fujimori!" read a banner of Peru's largest union confederation, which had some 200 members rallying to demand Fujimori be convicted.
"Fujimori is innocent!" "Liberty for Fujimori!" shouted his supporters, waving orange flags, the color of his Alliance for the Future Party.
His supporters say it is unfair to prosecute a man who ended a vicious guerrilla war and tamed a chaotic economy during his 1990-2000 rule.
Families of victims who disappeared in the massacres pushed for the trial for years and are calling for a tough sentence.
Fujimori was extradited to Peru from Chile in September after seven years in exile, five of them in Japan, the country of his parents' birth.
Around 70,000 Peruvians died or disappeared in fighting and massacres between the military, the Shining Path, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, and peasants in poor mountain towns during 20 years of conflict that broke out in 1980.
Most were killed before Fujimori took office in 1990, and the violence faded after Fujimori's forces captured the Shining Path's supreme leader Abimael Guzman in 1992.
- REUTERS
