Witness Saw Soldiers at Site Where Priests Died : Salvador: Housekeeper is flown to U.S. for safety. Church officials say attorney general is stalling probe.

Hours before she was spirited out of the country under heavy guard, a sworn witness told government officials she saw armed men in military uniforms enter Central American University the night six Jesuit priests were slain there.

The testimony--the only firsthand account so far of events the night of the murders--came to light Friday amid charges by Roman Catholic Church officials that the Salvadoran attorney general is blocking a thorough investigation of the highly sensitive case.

Father Jose Maria Tojeira, provincial of the Society of Jesus in Central America, said it was “absurd” that Atty. Gen. Mauricio Colorado has yet to interview soldiers posted near the university in the hours that the killers were there.

Lucia Cerna, a housekeeper at the rectory, told judicial officials she saw uniformed men “like the soldiers she sees in the street” enter the campus before dawn Nov. 16 and shoot at cars and the university chapel.

Cerna testified that she did not see the executions, nor could she positively identify the gunmen, Tojeira said.

“A witness who saw the killers in the act and could identify them does not exist,” he said. “But there are sufficient facts for there to be an investigation within the armed forces.”

On Friday, Colorado pledged a complete investigation into the assassinations, but he dismissed Cerna’s six hours of testimony as “nothing conclusive” and acknowledged that no military officials have been questioned.

He also said he would summon Catholic Church and Christian Democratic Party leaders who have blamed the killings on right-wing extremists.

The university rector, Father Ignacio Ellacuria, five other priests, their cook and her 15-year-old daughter were shot to death early Nov. 16 during an overnight curfew. The neighborhood was surrounded by soldiers that night, and church officials say members of the army’s 1st Infantry Brigade had searched the rectory two nights before the murders.

Cerna reportedly testified that she heard Father Ignacio Martin-Baro, another of the slain priests, scream at his assailants: “You are committing an injustice! You are scum!”

President Alfredo Cristiani has vowed to solve the case, which has tarnished his six-month-old Nationalist Republican Alliance government, and U.S. officials are pushing for arrests. They say that a Salvadoran private prosecutor will be brought in if the attorney general does not press ahead.

In Washington, a senior U.S. official said the Bush Administration also believes the Jesuits were killed in a right-wing act of retaliation against murders by Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front guerrillas. He gave no further details.

Similar cases, such as the 1980 assassination of Msgr. Oscar Arnulfo Romero, archbishop of San Salvador, have never been resolved. No military officer has been been convicted of such political crimes.

Diplomats, church officials and political analysts say that the outcome of an apparent power struggle between U.S.-backed moderates and extreme rightists within the government and the military will determine whether the case is solved.

“Their only interest in this case is to separate one sector of the army from another,” said a church source who declined to be identified. “If the hard line wins, it will not be solved. If the case is solved, it will be because the line that is less hard won.”

San Salvador Mayor Armando Calderon Sol said Cristiani asked the armed forces on Wednesday--nearly a week after the killings--to tell him which military units controlled the area around the university on the night of the crime. He still has not received an answer, Calderon Sol said.

Another government official close to Cristiani said the president had sought the information earlier. The official, who declined to be identified, said two military units were on duty around the university that night--one in the immediate campus area and another farther away.

“There was an inner circle and an outer circle,” he said. “The men in those units must have seen the killers escape.”

He said that a guerrilla offensive in the capital has slowed the investigation. “When the army is busy with a war, you can’t lean on them too hard,” he said.

Cerna, the witness, gave her testimony Wednesday and Thursday at the Spanish and French embassies, where she had taken refuge following the murders. She was escorted to Comalapa International Airport by U.S. and European diplomats, and a U.S. Embassy official accompanied her to the United States. Cerna traveled with her husband and 6-year-old daughter Thursday evening to Miami, where she is now under federal protection, a senior U.S. official in Washington confirmed.

Cerna is believed to have “important evidence, but not the smoking gun,” the American official said. Salvadoran authorities have been invited to come to Miami to interview her further.

U.S. Ambassador William Walker has offered protection to any witnesses who come forward in the case.

A transcript of Cerna’s testimony was not available. According to Tojeira, who spoke to her and heard part of her testimony, Cerna saw the gunmen enter the university from a window of her house about 70 feet away.

“She said they were there for 30 to 35 minutes and that they acted like they were in charge of the situation,” Tojeira said. “They shot in the air and at cars and once at the chapel.

“They took the luxury of doing in 30 minutes what could have been done in five,” he said.

Colorado said Cerna testified that she saw “five people at the scene, not 30 like she said at first, dressed in military uniforms . . . two in camouflage uniforms and three in dark, not black, uniforms.”

Tojeira said she saw five men at a time but she was convinced there were 30 gunmen in all.

A U.S. source said the priests were shot at least four times each. All but one were shot in the head with a high-velocity weapon.

Church sources close to the investigation say that the gunmen stole a radio, a compact disc player and $5,000 in cash that Ellacuria had been given as part of a human rights prize in Spain a few days before he was killed. The contents of the briefcase he had brought back from Spain also are missing from the priests’ modest quarters.

The sources, who asked not to be identified, said detectives lifted fingerprints from the priests’ chambers.

The attackers, these sources said, used sophisticated flame throwers to damage a computer printer, a turntable and other belongings.

The killers left behind a handwritten cardboard sign drawn with crayon. The words, in script, said: “The FMLN Carried Out This Execution Against Enemy Spies. Conquer or Die!”

Church officials say there are several other houses in the neighborhood, and they believe other witnesses eventually will come forth with evidence. But the officials are not actively seeking them or pressing anyone to testify.

One source explained: “The problem with testifying is that you have to spend four days in an embassy, leave under heavy security with a lot of tension, feel disoriented under interrogation, go to a foreign country and know that you can’t go home for several years. It’s very complicated, and not everyone is willing to do it.”

Times staff writers Richard Boudreaux, in San Salvador, and Doyle McManus, in Washington, contributed to this article.