Colonel Ordered Jesuit Murders, Cristiani Says : El Salvador: The president cites testimony from soldiers who allegedly took part.

President Alfredo Cristiani on Tuesday said that junior officers arrested in the slaying of six Jesuit priests have told investigators their colonel specifically ordered them to commit the murders.

Col. Guillermo Alfredo Benavides, head of El Salvador’s military academy, has denied the charges against him, Cristiani said in an interview.

“But the testimony of the lieutenants is that they received a direct order from him to go and shoot the priests,” he said.

This is the first public suggestion that orders for the killings had been issued.

Cristiani announced last week that Benavides, three lieutenants and four soldiers had been detained in connection with the assassinations. Benavides was commander of the zone where the murders took place, and the soldiers were based at his academy that night.

On Tuesday, the case was turned over to a civilian judge, who has 72 hours to decide if there is enough evidence to continue holding the men and proceed to trial. The eight suspects appeared briefly at the judge’s chambers in the afternoon but refused to comment to reporters.

Benavides, who arrived in full military uniform, is the first high-ranking officer ever accused of a political murder by the government. Military and paramilitary “death squads” have been blamed for thousands of civilian deaths during the country’s 10-year civil war, but the tightly knit military has been virtually immune from prosecution.

Cristiani said he is optimistic that this case will be brought to trial “because of the amount of proof” against the suspects.

The priests, along with their cook and her 15-year-old daughter, were assassinated at their residence at the Central American University on Nov. 16, five days after leftist guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front launched a massive urban offensive. The university is near the military academy.

Cristiani admitted that the arrest of Benavides has created tension within the armed forces but said he does not consider that a threat to his seven-month-old government.

“Tensions now don’t mean what they did in the 1970s and early 1980s. I don’t fear a coup,” Cristiani said.

Benavides is a member of the powerful tandona , the military academy class that controls most of the important military commands in the country. Col. Rene Emilio Ponce, armed forces chief of staff, is a member of that class, but Cristiani insisted that he and the rest of the high command backed the investigation.

Some in the military are concerned that the case will fuel the guerrillas’ strategy of trying to divide the army. In their latest peace proposal, the rebels called for the removal of members of the tandona .

Last week, army commanders received anonymous packets in the mail containing an article on corruption in the military and a report by captains and majors criticizing the high command’s management of the war and alleged corruption.

In the hourlong interview, Cristiani said that a lieutenant and a second lieutenant from the Atlacatl Battalion reported receiving the order from Benavides. Another lieutenant based at the Gen. Gerardo Barrios Military School said he was simply told by Benavides to “accompany them on the mission,” Cristiani said.

Under Salvadoran law, the testimony of an indicted suspect is not admissible against another defendant. Sources close to the case say other soldiers who allegedly participated in the action have been detained but will not be charged so that they may serve as witnesses.

Cristiani said those arrested participated in a Nov. 13 search of the university and the priests’ residence, which he said he had authorized.

“Obviously, I would not have liked it, but they (the military) said, ‘Look, we’re being fired on.’ I did say, ‘Well, go ahead,’ ” Cristiani said.

Sources familiar with the case said that Benavides may have been pursuing intelligence reports that guerrillas or members of the leftist Salvadoran National Workers Union were meeting on the campus. No such meeting was discovered.

A source familiar with the case said the Nov. 13 search of the campus and Jesuit residence appears in the army high command’s records of military operations but that no action on the campus was recorded on Nov. 16, when the killings occurred.

Cristiani said the army was listed as a possible suspect from the beginning of the investigation.

“We were expecting anything to come up. We jotted down different possible motives. Obviously, elements from the armed forces were under duress, and with the tensions of war, sometimes people get things on their mind that are not rational,” he said.

Some observers are skeptical that the military had intended to take the blame all the way to Benavides. The colonel’s name did not surface until another Salvadoran colonel leaked the information to a U.S. military adviser.

The U.S. adviser, a major, held the information for nearly two weeks before passing it on to his superior. Col. Ponce, the armed forces chief, reportedly was stunned when U.S. officials confronted him with the suspicions about Benavides.

Col. Carlos Armando Aviles, who fingered Benavides, had been detained, but Cristiani said he is no longer confined to quarters. But he confirmed that Aviles will not be sent as military attache to Washington, as he had been ordered before the controversy began.

Some political observers suggest it is unlikely that Benavides would have acted alone to order what clearly would be an internationally repudiated political crime. They also question whether other mid-level officers--majors and captains--were involved.

Cristiani said the investigation has been straightforward and that it will continue. He said the armed forces willingly pursued the investigation and that he did not have to negotiate with the military for it to proceed.

Rather, Cristiani said, the recent events have provided an opportunity for the army to show its development as a democratic institution.