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La Jornada Newspaper
Friday, December 6, 2024, p. 21

Bogota. The Colombian Attorney General’s Office notified yesterday that it will verify the alleged existence of 20,000 unidentified bodies in a hangar at the Bogotá airport, after the United Nations Committee against Forced Disappearances warned about their possible existence.

The information about an alleged hangar with unidentified bodies was communicated to the independent experts of the United Nations (UN), who concluded yesterday a visit to Colombia to verify the country’s work in the search for its thousands of missing persons.

It is a report that we have also received from the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences. We have not visited themsaid Carmen Rosa Villa, member of the UN committee, during a press conference in Bogotá.

In the absence of a suitable place

Villa explained that the human remains would be kept in a hangar because there would be no place to preserve them.

Hours later, the aforementioned Colombian institute denied the existence of such a warehouse for corpses.

However, the Attorney General’s Office ordered the forensic institute to provide explanations on the matter.

The attorney general for Human Rights, Javier Sarmiento, stated in a video released to the press that before the severity and magnitude of the information received by the committee of the UN, its personnel will travel to the El Dorado airport to investigate.

More than 121,768 people have been victims of forced disappearance in Colombia between 1985 and 2016, according to a document from the Truth Commission, an extrajudicial body that had the mission of clarifying the long Colombian conflict after the 2016 peace agreement. with the extinct guerrilla Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.