Spain court accepts complaint against Colombia presidential challenger

Spain’s National Court has admitted a complaint against Colombian presidential challenger Gustavo Petro for allegedly kidnapping a journalist decades ago when he belonged to a now-defunct guerrilla group, judicial sources said Monday.

Details of the decision to accept the case were released on Monday, a day after Colombians gave the leftist ex-guerrilla a historic lead in a first round of presidential elections. The runoff round is in June.

In a decision dated May 19, judge Joaquin Gadea found that Spain’s top criminal court had the jurisdiction to take on the case of the kidnapping of the late Fernando Gonzalez Pacheco, who died in 2014, on grounds that he held Spanish nationality.

The complaint was first filed in March by Francois Roger Cavard, a lawyer who in 2018 had tried unsuccessfully to overturn Petro’s candidature on grounds he had not been pardoned for crimes committed while he was part of the M-19 guerrilla group, which he joined as a teenager.

The journalist was briefly kidnapped for a few days in 1981 by M-19 but released unharmed.

The group laid down its arms in 1990.

In the complaint, Cavard accuses Petro of crimes against humanity as “one of the most senior leaders” of the urban guerrilla group which had carried out “selective killings”, “bombing attacks”, “massacres” and “kidnappings” as well as “torture, cruelty and disappearances”.

The Spanish prosecutor’s office had requested that the complaint be dismissed on the grounds that Spain’s judicial system has no jurisdiction to conduct such an investigation.