El Salvador's Supreme Court will ask the United States to extradite an ex-colonel accused in the killings of four Dutch journalists in 1982, during the Central American country's bloody civil war, a lawyer said Thursday.
Arrest warrants were issued more than two years ago for Mario Reyes Mena, 85, and two other former military officers for their alleged role in the reporters' deaths.
Koos Jacobus Andries Koster, Jan Cornelius Kuiper Joop, Hans Lodewijk ter Laag and Johannes Jan Willemsen were killed in March 1982 in a rural area north of the capital San Salvador where they were filming a documentary.
In 1993, a UN-sponsored Truth Commission set up after the 1980-1992 war found they had walked into an army ambush planned by Reyes and other officers.
The case was frozen in 1993, after the enactment of a law pardoning war crimes.
But the law was ruled unconstitutional in 2016, opening the door for the filing of criminal complaints.
Pedro Cruz, a lawyer for victims' families, told AFP Thursday he had been informed that the Supreme Court had approved an extradition request to be sent to the United States, where Reyes served as a military attache in the 1980s and continues to live in Virginia.
At the time of the killings, he was the commander of an army infantry brigade.
Former defense minister Jose Guillermo Garcia, 91, and another colonel -- 93-year-old Francisco Moran, are on trial in El Salvador for the same crime. Both are under police surveillance in a private hospital.
El Salvador's civil war, which pitted the military against leftist guerrillas, left more than 75,000 people dead.