Experts Deride Probe of Bishop’s Killing

A team of U.S. investigators produced new evidence Thursday that appears to contradict the Guatemalan government’s contention that a Roman Catholic priest bludgeoned to death a prominent bishop and human rights activist in April in a crime of passion.

Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi, 75, was killed just two days after he issued an extensive report detailing numerous human rights violations by the Guatemalan military during 35 years of civil war. His death provoked a furor in Guatemala and led to widespread suspicions that the military was involved in the killing.

Dissatisfied with the government investigation that led to the arrest of the priest, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Guatemala asked an investigative team of three Americans to look into the case. The Americans, who included a Texas medical examiner, said they volunteered to work free.

The investigators, releasing their findings in affidavits filed with a judge in Guatemala and in a news conference in Washington, ridiculed the Guatemala government’s handling of the case.

“The last thing the [Guatemalan] government wants to do is have a real investigation,” said San Francisco lawyer and private detective Jack Palladino. “All they want is a fall guy. If he’s a priest, so much the better.”

In July, Guatemalan police arrested Father Mario Orantes, a priest who lived with Bishop Gerardi, and took his dog, an 11-year-old German shepherd named Baloo, into custody as well. Police alleged that Orantes ordered the dog to attack and bite the bishop in the garage of their Guatemala City home and then, after Gerardi fell to the ground, smashed his head with a chunk of concrete.

Pressured by the archdiocese to reopen the case, Guatemalan authorities exhumed Gerardi’s body for a second autopsy in mid-September. The U.S. team--Dr. Robert C. Bux, deputy chief medical examiner of metropolitan San Antonio; Dr. Norman D. Sperber, chief forensic dentist for San Diego and Imperial counties; and Palladino--was allowed to observe, but not take part in, the reexamination of the body.

The U.S. team concluded that the scenario described by Guatemalan police makes no sense for four reasons:

* Gerardi’s facial and neck wounds were not caused by dog bites, as claimed by the authorities. Sperber, in an affidavit, said “the post-mortem examination . . . did not reveal anything that was even close to being consistent with a dog’s bite.”

* Baloo, a docile animal, was too crippled and old to leap at anyone.

* Although the concrete slab found in the garage was used in the attack, the wounds showed evidence of a second weapon--perhaps an iron bar, a crowbar or a pipe. Palladino called it “a weapon never produced, never found.”

* Orantes would not have had the strength to knock down and drag Gerardi, who weighed 240 pounds and stood almost 6 feet tall, by himself.

Palladino and Bux did not cite any evidence that would link the death to the Guatemalan military. But Edgar Gutierrez, who directed the archdiocese team that produced the evidence in Gerardi’s report on human rights, told reporters that a witness saw a car with military plates outside the bishop’s home on the night of his death.

Gerardi’s human rights report, titled “Never Again,” was a key element in the peace agreement worked out by the government and rebel leaders under U.N. auspices in 1996.