12 ex-police found guilty in Ecuador abuses

QUITO: Twelve police were found guilty of the illegal detention and torture of four people in September 2009, a court said Wednesday.

Six of the accused were found guilty of being the planners of the crime and the rest of being accomplices in carrying it out, the court in Pichinca province said, noting that sentences would be announced in coming days.

Prosecutors said the four people held -- all members of the same family -- were detained without arrest warrants because they were suspected of links to a theft; the four then were tortured in the police station, and one later died, prosecutors said.

At the time of the events, the police were part of an Operational Support Group, set up in 1996 but disbanded in 2009 amid allegation of human rights abuses, human rights activists said.

President Rafael Correa has charged that police being investigated for human rights abuses, aligned with opposition forces, were behind the September 30, 2010 police rebellion in which the president briefly was held against his will. He says the plotters aimed to oust him and murder him.

That uprising left 10 people dead and another 274 injured.

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2011