LIMA, Peru (AP):
A JUDGE in the Amazon town of Pucallpa has ruled there is insufficient evidence to charge a provincial mayor implicated in the murder of a journalist who had accused him of cocaine trafficking, local media reported yesterday.
An arrest order was issued last week for Luis Valdez, mayor of the Coronel Portillo province where Pucallpa is located, after the confessed gunmen told authorities that Valdez and several other men had offered him US$300,000 on April 20, 2004, to kill Alberto Rivera, a radio talk show host.
But Judge Rosario Nino ruled Monday that the allegation was insufficient to charge Valdez, newspaper reports said. A court administrator, who declined to provide her name, confirmed the information. She told The Associated Press that prosecutors were appealing the decision.
Nino and local prosecutors in Pucallpa, 490 kilometres (305 miles) northeast of Lima, could not immediately be reached for comment.
SHOT TO DEATH
Rivera, president of the local journalist federation and host of a radio programme, was shot to death on April 21, 2004, in his office. He had accused Valdez of masterminding a 551-kilogram (1,215-pound) cocaine shipment hidden in a cargo of plywood that police had seized in 2003 in Lima's port of Callao.
The plywood was being shipped by Valdez's lumber company, Industrial Ucayali SAC, but a criminal investigation against him was later dropped.
