Nobel Laureate Urges Death For Killers Of Guatemala Refugees

Refugees who fled civil war and returned to face more violence mourned 11 slain neighbors Sunday and heard Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchu urge that the killers be executed.

“I will become involved in the investigations until the trial ends and the guilty are punished,” Menchu told villagers crowded into the tiny, dirt-floor Roman Catholic church for Mass in the jungle village, 80 miles north of Guatemala City.

Menchu stood near the altar, beside the simple wood coffin of Carlos Fernando Choc, the 11th person to die from Thursday’s shooting by government troops.

The other 10 were buried Saturday.

A light rain drummed on the tin roof of the wood-plank church and dampened dozens of villagers unable to fit inside.

Menchu, who won the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize, cut short a lecture tour in the United States to return to Guatemala after learning of the shooting and said the death penalty should be applied to the soldiers involved.

More than 100,000 people have died in country’s 33-year civil war.

The villagers are refugees who fled the war in the early 1980s as the army obliterated dozens of villages suspected of harboring leftist rebels. Those who fled finally returned last year, believing peace talks and reduced fighting had made the country relatively safe.

The killings have shaken the country and embarrassed the military a month before presidential elections.

They have also temporarily frozen preparations for the return of thousands of other refugees who remain at camps in Mexico.

Two soldiers injured in the incident accused villagers of disarming three soldiers, then firing on their patrol.

Villagers, however, say the soldiers attacked with guns and grenades when they were told not to bring arms into the village.

President Ramiro de Leon Carpio has accepted full responsibility for the slaying as commander in chief of the armed forces.

Twenty-four soldiers have been charged in the killings and are being held at a military base pending trial.

The following fields overflowed: DATELINE = AURORA OCHO DE OCTU-BRE, GUATEMALA