Santos apologises to victims of 'false positives'

Former Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos apologised on Friday to victims of the so-called "false positives", the extrajudicial killings of civilians by members of the Colombian Army.

More than 6,000 people are believed to have been killed during years of executions, which saw soldiers pass victims off as guerrillas killed in combat in order to claim benefits.

"I am left with the remorse, the deep regret," Santos said during a voluntary statement to Colombia's Truth Commission, an official but non-judicial body that seeks the historical truth of the armed conflict after the signing of the peace agreement between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2016.

Santos was defence minister and thus head of the army between 2002 and 2008, during the government of former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, the period in which there was the highest number of false positive killings, according to the Attorney General's Office and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP).

In February this year, the JEP raised the number of victims to 6,402, tripling the official known total so far.

Santos's testimony joins those already given by former presidents Ernesto Samper in 2019 and César Gaviria in 2020.

Authorities have determined that the victims were usually low-income youths who were lured with a job offer, taken to remote locations and then killed.

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