Four former Salvadorean guardsmen convicted of killing three US nuns and a lay worker in 1980 said for the first time they acted on orders from military authorities, the New York Times has reported.
El Salvador and the US have always officially argued that the men acted on their own while human rights groups maintained the murders were ordered, approved and directed by the military.
The newspaper said the four former guardsmen made their statements from prison to investigators of the Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights, a New York-based group that represents the families of the four women. They subsequently repeated the admissions to a New York Times reporter, the newspaper said.
The report quoted one of the guardsmen as saying his superior had told the four men: "Don't be worried. This is an order that comes from higher levels, and nothing is going to happen to us."
That superior was also convicted but he is held in a separate prison from the others and declined to talk to the investigators.
The four former guardsmen were convicted of murder in 1984, sentenced to 30 years in prison and have twice been declared ineligible for an amnesty offered at the end of the civil war in El Salvador because their crime is classified as non-political.
Three American Maryknoll nuns - Maura Clarke, Ita Ford and Dorothy Kazel - and a lay worker, Jean Donovan, were abducted, raped and shot to death on the night of December 2nd, 1980. Their bodies were found by peasants the next day and buried in a common grave.
The killings occurred when the United States was beginning a decade-long, $7 billion aid effort in the small Central American country to prevent leftwing guerrillas from coming to power.
