A Salvadoran ex-defense minister and two colonels will go on trial next month for their alleged role in the killings of four Dutch journalists 43 years ago, NGOs in the Central American country said Monday.
The trial will open on April 23 for ex-minister Jose Guillermo Garcia, 91, former police colonel Francisco Antonio Moran, 93, and ex-infantry brigade commander Mario Reyes Mena, 85.
Garcia and Moran are under police surveillance in a private hospital in San Salvador, while Reyes lives in the United States, from where El Salvador is seeking his extradition.
Arrest warrants for the three were issued more than two years ago.
Koos Koster, Jan Kuiper, Hans ter Laag and Joop Willemsen were killed in March 1982 in a rural area north of the capital where they were filming a documentary during El Salvador's 1980-1992 civil war.
In 1993, a UN-sponsored Truth Commission 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.
The Salvadoran Association for Human Rights and a foundation assisting the victims' families said in a statement Monday that the trial date has been set for April 23.
It will start in the absence of Reyes, who moved to the United States to serve as a military attache in the 1980s. He continues to live in Virginia.
El Salvador's Supreme Court this month gave the go-ahead for an extradition request to be sent to the United States.
The Embassy of the Netherlands in Costa Rica, which also serves other Central American nations, welcomed the announcement as a "historic moment in the fight against impunity and for press freedom."
El Salvador's civil war, which pitted the military against leftist guerrillas, left more than 75,000 people dead.