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OTTAWA — Canada is moving to strip citizenship from a man accused of slaughtering villagers in Guatemala using a grenade, gun and sledgehammer.

Jorge Vinicio Sosa Orantes concealed his brutal role in a 1982 massacre by the Guatemalan military in obtaining Canadian citizenship a decade later, the federal government says in newly filed court documents.

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Sosa Orantes, 59, is now serving a 10-year sentence for immigration fraud in the United States, where he also held citizenship until it was revoked in 2014.

Canada has opted to strip citizenship in only a handful of modern-day war crimes cases.

The bloody, decades-long conflict between Guatemalan government forces and guerrillas intensified in the early 1980s.

The military junta began a ruthless campaign of destruction that wiped out 440 villages, killing over 75,000 people and displacing more than 250,000, the Canadian government says in documents filed in Federal Court.