Widow Blames Us Officials for Guatemala Dirty War Death

The American widow of a Guatemalan leftwing leader who was tortured and killed by a CIA "asset" 10 years ago is seeking the right to sue the then secretary of state Warren Christopher and two national officials for his death.

Jennifer Harbury's application to bring a case against former senior US officials, which reached the supreme court this week, could throw light on the role of the US intelligence services in the "dirty wars" fought by death squads in Central America in the past 30 years.

Ms Harbury, herself a lawyer, went to the supreme court to argue that she has the right to bring a civil action against named government officials, including Mr Christopher, the former national security adviser Anthony Lake, and the former ambassador to Guatemala Marilyn McAfee.

Efrain Bamaca-Velasquez was kidnapped and held by members of the Guatemalan armed forces in March 1992. At first the army told Ms Harbury that her husband had committed suicide, but the grave in which she was told he was buried did not contain his body.

She had also asked US officials for information and for help in tracing her husband. She was told that the US had no information about him.

Three years later, after inquiries by the Democratic senator Robert Torricelli, classified documents were released showing that Bamaca-Velasquez had been killed on the orders of an officer who was described as an "asset" of the CIA: someone who was not employed by the agency but assisted it.

The US knew at the time of her husband's kidnapping who had carried it out but, Ms Harbury says, it chose to tell her that it had no information.

The government's lawyers argue that the case should not proceed, on the grounds that government officials are entitled to give misleading information.

"There are lots of different situations when the government has legitimate reasons to give out false information," the solicitor general, Theodore Olson, told the supreme court this week.

Ms Harbury argued that if she had known that her husband was being held by people connected to the CIA she could have sought a legal injunction to prevent the CIA "requesting and paying for continued information being extracted by torture of a living prisoner".

Ms Harbury, the author of Searching for Evarado (a leftwing guerrilla commander) has held two hunger strikes in Guatemala City and one outside the White House, to draw attention to the case.