The Supreme Court in Bogotá determined the lawfulness of the arrest of María del Pilar Hurtado Afanador, former Head at the Administrative Department of Security (DAS) who is linked to an investigation which is conducted by the Supreme Court of Justice due to illegal wiretappings performed by the officially dissolved DAS.
This decision also ordered depriving Hurtado Afanador of her liberty in the Office of the Attorney General (known as Búnker) in order to comply with a preventive detention order issued in 2011 for the alleged commission of aggravated conspiracy to commit offenses, embezzlement, aggravated illegal wiretapping, misuse of public office, document tampering.
Once lawfulness of the arrest was determined, the Attorney General, Eduardo Montealegre Lynett, stated that there is evidence against former DAS Head for illegal wiretappings conducted against Magistrates of the Supreme Court, opponent leaders in Colombia and Human Rights defenders.
Montealegre explained that the offenses attributed to María del Pilar Hurtado before the Supreme Court and by which the Office of the Attorney General requested her sentence before the Criminal Chamber are ordinary offenses.
The senior officer also reminded that the Attorney General´s Office opinion is that it is not a political offense; it is not a political persecution but a serious accusation due to the commission of human rights violations. This was also accepted by the Supreme Court in Panama which denied asylum status for María del Pilar Hurtado last year as it considered it was not a political offense but ordinary offenses.
Likewise, he explained that once the sentence is pronounced and even a guilty verdict is delivered, there is an opportunity from a procedural point of view to begin mechanisms of cooperation with justice.
Finally, Montealegre urged the former public servant to cooperate in order to find out the truth about this case. “We exhort María del Pilar Hurtado to cooperate with justice, to contribute to recover the historical truth concerning those serious facts that affected the country, to tell us who ordered those illegal wiretappings, who were the recipients of this information, this monitoring, these serious human rights violations”.