This article is more than 10 years old

This article is more than 10 years old

A Colombian court has convicted a retired army general of murder and sentenced him to 40 years in prison for his role in a 1997 massacre by far-right militias.

The sentence of former general Jaime Humberto Uscátegui is the most severe imposed on a senior Colombian officer in a case of collusion with rightwing death squads.

A paramilitary force murdered at least 49 suspected guerrilla sympathisers in the village of Mapiripán from 15-20 July 1997. At the time, Uscátegui was a brigade commander in charge of a garrison where a pair of chartered planes carrying far-right gunmen landed. The men were then dispatched to oversee the massacre.

During the five-day killing spree, the local judge, Ivan Cortes, made repeated telephone calls for help to Uscátegui's subordinates but said they ignored his pleas to send troops to halt the massacre.

The murders – bodies were hacked up and many thrown in a river – marked the bloody arrival of rightwing death squads in Colombia's eastern plains, where they would go on to kill hundreds of suspected leftist rebel sympathisers.

Human rights groups have long accused Colombia's military of aiding and abetting rightwing death squads, citing the Mapiripán massacre as a clear case of close co-operation between the army and landowner-backed militias operating outside the law.

Uscátegui "did not make even the most minimal effort to try to confirm the extraordinary deeds" the three-judge panel of the Bogotá superior tribunal said in its 90-page ruling, which was issued on Monday but not made public until yesterday.

The court found Uscátegui guilty of murder, kidnapping and falsifying public documents.

The former general insisted he was innocent and his lawyer said he would appeal the verdict to Colombia's supreme court. "I have the tranquillity of innocence and I also have the tranquillity of proof," Uscátegui, 61, said.

His lawyer, Edgar Saavedra, said Uscátegui would turn himself in as soon as he received the arrest order.

Another former army general, Rito Alejo del Río, is in jail pending trial in a civilian court on charges of murder for killings allegedly committed by rightwing death squads that prosecutors say worked closely with his forces during the mid-1990s in the turbulent Uraba region on the Caribbean coast.

Uscátegui was first arrested in 1999 and tried by a military court, which in 2001 sentenced him to 40 months in prison for the crime of "omission". The battalion commander who failed to halt the Mapiripán massacre, former colonel Hernán Orozco, was convicted of murder in 2007 and sentenced to 40 years in prison.