A tribunal in Colombia has sentenced a former paramilitary leader, Salvatore Mancuso, to 40 years in prison for murders and forced disappearances committed at the height of the country's armed conflict.
Mancuso was a commander in the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), a right-wing paramilitary group originally created to defend landowners from attacks by Marxist guerrilla groups, which became involved in drug trafficking.
The tribunal found that under his command, AUC members committed more than 100 crimes in La Guajira povince between 2002 and 2006.
Mancuso was sent back to Colombia in 2024 after serving a 15-year prison sentence in the US for drug trafficking.
The 61-year-old was sentenced on Monday by a special tribunal created to deal with cases arising from Colombia's decades-long armed conflict, in which at least 450,000 people were killed between 1985 and 2018 according to figures compiled by a truth commission.
