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A LAST-MINUTE judicial review has blocked the release of a Colombian paramilitary warlord sentenced to 40 years in prison for ordering hundreds of murders.
Early on Tuesday, the lawyer for Ramon Isaza said his client was paroled by a Bogota court after serving the maximum eight-year sentence granted to thousands of paramilitaries who surrendered and confessed their crimes under a 2005 peace accord.
Victims and prosecutors have questioned the grounds for Mr Isaza’s release, saying he has not co-operated with investigations into massacres committed by his death squads
The 74-year-old, who goes by the alias “El Viejo” (the Old Man), claims to suffers from memory loss.
Mr Isaza was one of the original leaders of the far-right militias formed by ranchers in the late 1970s to combat Marxist guerillas.
In the 1990s he battled Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cocaine cartel for control of drug routes in the Magdalena Valley.
