Illegal killings by army seen widespread in Colombia

The widespread and systematic killing of innocent civilians by Colombian security forces must be investigated by the government or else the international courts could intervene, the United Nations said Saturday. The government fired 27 army officers Wednesday after a probe implicated them in the deaths of a group of young men who disappeared from their homes and were later shot, piled into mass graves and counted as combat deaths. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay called for more investigations into what rights groups say is a growing trend of soldiers artificially improving their statistics by shooting civilians and passing their bodies off as combatants killed in Colombia's 44-year-old guerrilla war. Hundreds of such cases are pending as family members of the victims decry the killings. "An offense becomes a crime against humanity when it is widespread and systematic against a civilian population. We are observing and keeping track of the number of extrajudicial killings, which do appear to be systematic and widespread, in my view," Pillay said. "It is only when a country is unable or unwilling to investigate these serious crimes that the International Criminal Court would have the power to intervene," she told reporters at the end of a one-week fact-finding trip. Pillay, a South African, joined the U.N. in July after serving as a judge at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. London-based rights group Amnesty International says the United States and other countries should halt military aid to Colombia until its army stops the abuses. Washington has given billions of dollars in aid to the government of President Alvaro Uribe, whose administration has seen a series of scandals, including one in which scores of Congress members, mostly from his coalition, are accused of using right-wing death squads to intimidate voters.