El Salvador ex-colonel fights extradition for notorious murder of Jesuit priests

Jonathan M Katz in Greenville, North Carolina
Thursday 20 August 2015 13.32 BST

Inocente Orlando Montano sat in the sparsely filled courtroom, saying nothing, as two American lawyers and a federal judge argued his fate.

In court, the man who was once El Salvador’s vice-minister of defense and public safety wore an orange jumpsuit stamped with the initials of the North Carolina prison where he currently resides. A blue walker was parked behind him.

Wednesday’s argument centred on whether Montano, 73 and an ex-colonel in the Salvadorian military, would be extradited from the United States to Spain, where a judge eagerly waits to prosecute him for one of the most notorious crimes of his country’s horrific 12-year civil war: the murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and the housekeeper’s teenage daughter, on a university campus in San Salvador in 1989.

There was no decision from the US magistrate judge on Wednesday, surprising many watching the case unfold in US district court who thought extradition would be quickly granted under the firm prodding of the State Department.

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