Colombian ex-president gets 12 years of house arrest

On Friday, August 1, former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe was sentenced to 12 years of house arrest for witness tampering and bribery. This was reported by NBC News.

The verdict, which Uribe has vowed to appeal, was handed down after a nearly six-month trial. Prosecutors presented evidence that he had tried to influence witnesses who accused him of having ties to paramilitary groups in the 1990s.

"Politics trumped the law during the sentencing," Uribe said after Friday's hearing.

Uribe, 73, denied any wrongdoing. His lawyer asked the court to allow the former Colombian president to remain free while he appeals the verdict. The judge on Friday said she did not grant the defense's request because it would be "easy" for him to leave the country to "evade the sanction imposed".

The court also banned Uribe from holding public office for eight years and imposed a fine of about $776,000.

The Court of Appeals will have until early October to issue a decision, which either side can then appeal to the Colombian Supreme Court.

The judge said she had seen enough evidence that Uribe had conspired with a lawyer to persuade three former members of the paramilitary group who were in prison to change the testimony they gave to Ivan Cepeda, the leftist senator who launched an investigation into the former president's alleged ties to the group .

In 2012, Uribe filed a defamation lawsuit against Cepeda in the Supreme Court. But in 2018, it dismissed the charges against Zepeda and launched an investigation into Uribe's case.

The article says that Uribe served as president from 2002 to 2010, with strong US support. He remains a controversial figure: some consider him the savior of the country, who stopped its slide into the status of a "failed state," while others associate him with human rights violations and the rise of paramilitaryism in the 1990s.

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