The jury found three former officers guilty of killing journalists who were making the documentary of the Civil War of El Salvador at the time.

Three former officers in the El Salvadorian army were convicted of being killed by four Dutch journalists in the brutal civil war in Central America in 1982.

Former defence colonel Jose Guillermo Garcia, 91, and former police colonel Francisco Moran, 93, former corporate brigade commander Colonel Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena, 85, were found guilty Tuesday night at a jury in a northern city in Chalatenango on Tuesday night.

Diario Salvador News Media reported that the three former officers - none in court - were sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Four Dutch journalists, Koos Koster, Jan Kuiper, Hans Ter Laag and Joop Willemsen, were killed while filming a television documentary about the El Salvador Civil War, with an estimated 75,000 civilians killed by U.S.-backed government security forces between 1980 and 1992 - most of them being killed by U.S.-backed government security forces.

Journalists have been linked to the left-wing rebels and plan to lag a few days behind the frontline of reporting the war. But the El Salvador soldiers armed assault rifles and machine guns, ambushing them and the rebels.

“We have clearly shown the level of liability of the defendant,” said Oscar Perez, attorney for Comunicandonos, who represents the victim.

"Associated in the entire organized power structure in the political and military decisions that led to the murder of journalists," he said.

The United Nations-sponsored Truth Commission discovered in 1993 that journalists walked into an ambush trap, the Reyes program, who still lives in the United States, as well as other officials' knowledge.

The El Salvador Supreme Court approved Reyes' extradition request in March, but so far he has made no progress in returning from the United States.

Aging Garcia and Moran are conducting police surveillance at a private hospital in the capital San Salvador.

García was expelled from the United States in 2016 after a U.S. judge declared responsibility for serious human rights violations in the early stages of the war between the army and left-wing Farabundo Martí Martí National Liberation Front fighter jets.

After the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional, it passed a general amnesty that was unconstitutional after the end of the Civil War.

The case against the suspect was slow to move, but in March 2022, relatives of the victim and Dutch government representatives and those in charge of the face trial of journalists’ murders.