Centreville (USA), Oct 11 (AP) The brother of a Dutch journalist slain in 1982 covering El Salvador's civil war has filed a lawsuit against a former Salvadoran military officer who has lived for decades in the northern Virginia suburbs and is accused of orchestrating the killing.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in US District Court in Alexandria, seeks unspecified monetary damages against Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena and a declaration that he is responsible for the killings of Jan Kuiper and three other Dutch journalists.

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Reyes Mena, now 85, was a colonel who commanded El Salvador's Fourth Infantry Brigade. That unit, and Reyes Mena in particular, were declared responsible for the journalists' deaths by a United Nations Truth Commission that was established in 1992 as part of the peace agreement that ended El Salvador's civil war.

An estimated 75,000 civilians were killed during El Salvador's civil war, mostly by US-backed government security forces.

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“The killing of the Dutch journalists, which the UN Truth Commission highlighted as among the most emblematic crimes committed during the civil war, demonstrated the brutality with which the Salvadoran Security Forces sought to stifle national and international independent media in El Salvador,” the lawyers wrote in their complaint.

Kuiper and three other Dutch television journalists — Koos Koster, Hans ter Laag and Joop Willemsen — were ambushed as they tried to travel to territory controlled by the leftist guerilla group that was fighting the Salvadoran Security Forces.

According to the truth commission, the killings occurred near the El Paraiso military base that was under the command of Reyes Mena, who ordered the ambush.

At Reyes Mena's Centreville townhouse, a woman who identified herself as his wife declined to comment Thursday and said she would relay a reporter's request for comment to their lawyer, whom she did not identify.

The Center for Justice and Accountability, a nonprofit legal group that filed the lawsuit on behalf of Kuiper's brother, Gert Kuiper, has brought multiple cases over the years against individuals accused of overseas war crimes under US laws like the Torture Victim Protection Act. (AP)

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