[from left] Niall Connolly, James Monaghan, and Martin McCauley who were arrested a year ago
Posted on 12/04/2002 12:05:16 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
The prosecution of three alleged IRA men accused of training Colombia's Marxist rebels was thrown into turmoil yesterday when the two key witnesses against them refused to come to court, saying their lives would be in danger.
Amid chaotic scenes the trial was adjourned until February.
"The witnesses Edwin Giovani Rodriguez and Jhon Alexander Rodriguez, as guerrilla deserters, have received threats against their lives and so will not be attending the court," said a witness statement read out in court.
The testimony of the two men is crucial to the prosecution's case as they say they saw Niall Connolly, Martin McCauley and James Monaghan with guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).
The three Irishmen, all with links to the IRA or Sinn Fein, are charged with travelling on false papers and training rebels in terrorism techniques.
Alexander Rodriguez has been presented by a source in the prosecutor general's office as the crucial part in the prosecution's case. He is an Farc deserter, and acted as the driver and bodyguard of guerrilla commander Fabian Ramirez, in whose territory the training was alleged to have taken place.
The legal source indicated that he is the key witness who allegedly saw the Irishmen training the rebels in explosives, although there are others who claim they saw them with guerrilla commanders.
Pedro Mahecha, one of the Irishmen's lawyers, accused the prosecution of seeking to avoid the cross examination of the two Farc deserters.
"How is it that with 54 days notice the prosecution has been unable to assure the attendance of these witnesses, when the defence has brought people from Britain and they were here three days in advance?" Mr Mahecha asked the judge, Jairo Acosta.
His request that Judge Acosta rule that the prosecution's time to present witnesses had run out, and that the defence start, was denied, but with the prosecution's case in disarray the judge had no alternative but to reschedule the hearing.
As the trial is without a jury, most of the evidence is documentary and the refusal of the men to testify in court does not rule their written statements invalid as evidence.
The whereabouts of the two are unknown. Alexander Rodriguez is believed to be in hiding in the city of Villavicencio, east of Bogota, whilst Giovani Rodriguez (the two are not related), is in the government's "reinsertion programme" for rebel deserters. The Farc routinely kills any who desert, and the men's fear for their lives is real.
The trial had already gone badly for the prosecution, with its first witness, army major Carlos Matiz, an intelligence officer, being mauled by the defence.
He presented an explosives manual to the court, which he said had been seized in a military operation against one of the Farc's most feared military units, the Teofilo Forrero Mobile Column. He admitted under cross examination that he did not know exactly from where the manual came, having been given it by his superiors.
As the prosecution's expert witness he was also supposed to be able to demonstrate that the Farc expertise in explosives could only have come from the IRA. But he was forced to admit that the guerrillas were known to have links with other terrorist groups.
2 December 2002: Heavyweight team for IRA suspects in Colombia*** For the Colombian military the case is simple. A Colombian general told The Telegraph, on condition of anonymity, that his explosives experts had no doubt that the recent wave of Farc urban terrorism, particularly the use of mortars, was the direct result of IRA training. He said the similarity to incidents in Northern Ireland and on the British mainland was too close to be coincidence.
But the prosecutor general's office, strapped for cash and resources and working on thousands of cases involving guerrillas, Right-wing paramilitaries and drugs traffickers, is being seriously outgunned in terms of resources and expertise by the Irishmen's defence. The speculation is that the defence team, that includes some of Colombia's most noted lawyers, may be able to muddy waters the prosecution is desperately trying to clear, enough to get the men freed. If convicted they face up to 20 years in prison.***
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