The powerful Peruvian intelligence chief under former President Alberto Fujimori, Vladimiro Montesinos, was sentenced to 17 years in prison for the kidnapping in 1992 of a journalist critical of the government, Peruvian justice announced Thursday.
This sentence, pronounced for the kidnapping of Gustavo Gorriti, then correspondent of the Spanish daily El Pais, is considered completed, because Mr. Montesinos, 76, has already been serving a 25-year prison sentence since 2001 for human rights violations.
The Peruvian legal system does not add up the sentences handed down, only the longest is required.
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Gustavo Gorriti had been kidnapped by soldiers while he was at his home on the night of April 5, 1992, when Alberto Fujimori, with the support of the armed forces, dissolved Parliament and suspended the Constitution.
The journalist was briefly detained in cells at Army headquarters, pressure from Spanish diplomacy and the press leading to his release.
Mr. Montesinos, eminence grise of the Fujimori regime (1990-2000), was sentenced in 2001 to 25 years in prison for his involvement in the massacre of 15 people in Barrios Altos and the disappearance of nine students and a professor of the University of La Cantuta, by a military commando, perpetrated at the height of the fight against terrorism.