Judge Frees 3 in El Salvador Right-Wing Kidnap Probe

A judge, citing a lack of evidence, has freed two former Salvadoran military officers and an industrialist jailed three years ago in a highly publicized probe into right-wing kidnapings.

Judge Juan Hector Larios on Friday ordered the release of former Lt. Rodolfo Lopez Sibrian, former Maj. Jose Alfredo Jimenez Moreno and industrialist Orlando Llovera Ballete.

Larios also canceled arrest warrants for five other people, including a former army colonel.

The government alleged that Llovera Ballete and Lopez Sibrian posed as guerrillas to capture five businessmen in exchange for about $5 million between 1980 and 1985.

The two were reported to be close friends of Roberto d’Aubuisson, founder of the ultra-conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena. The party’s candidate, Alfredo Cristiani, won the March 16 presidential election and was officially named president-elect on Saturday.

The judge declared null the acts of a military judge who in 1986 started the proceedings.

Larios said that statements from witnesses on the kidnapings were not reliable and that there is insufficient evidence to hold the men.

When police captured Llovera Ballete and Lopez Sibrian in March, 1986, it was widely viewed as the start of a case that would pit the administration of Christian Democrat President Jose Napoleon Duarte against the conservative sectors of the military.

Lopez Sibrian also was implicated in the 1981 murders of two American land advisers--Mark David Pearlman of Seattle and Michael P. Hammer of Potomac, Md.--and a Salvadoran agrarian reform official.

The charges against Lopez Sibrian, who was later dismissed from the army, were dropped because of lack of evidence.

Pearlman and Hammer were advising the government on a land reform program that took thousands of acres from wealthy families for peasant use.

Five years later, two former army corporals were convicted in the case. The U.S. government later maintained that the “intellectual authors” of the crime had not been brought to justice.