November 30, 1983

PUERTO RICANS WERE KNEELING WHEN KILLED BY POLICE, OFFICER SAYS

(SAN JUAN, P.R.) In videotaped testimony broadcast tonight, a police detective said two young advocates of Puerto Rican independence were shot dead while on their knees by five police officers on an isolated mountaintop five years ago.

Official police accounts of the deaths of Carlos Soto Arrivi, 18 years old, and Armalvo Dario Rosado, 24, contended that the officers
fired in self-defense after the young men ignored an order to surrender and opened fire. The authorities said the radicals had gone to
the 4,000-foot Cerro Maravilla peak, the highest point in Puerto Rico, to sabotage a television relay station.

The six hours of testimony was delivered by Miguel Cartagena Flores, a detective in the intelligence division, before a Senate
investigating committee in secret session last week. It was videotaped and broadcast tonight.

In his testimony, Mr. Cartagena said that several hours before the shooting, on July 25, 1978, he and other officers were told by Angel
Perez Casillas, commander of the intelligence division, that ''these terrorists should not come down alive.''

Mr. Cartagena said he was ordered to drive the only civilian witness at the scene to a place nearby where the police had a radio relay
tower. When he returned, Mr. Cartagena testified, he saw four police officers pointing their weapons at the two young men, who
were kneeling before them.

''I could anticipate what was going to happen and I turned my eyes away,'' he testified. He said he heard about five shots and when he
looked again, he said he could see the jerk of the recoil in the arms of two officers, Luis Reveron Martinez and Rafael Moreno.

Mr. Cartagena testified after obtaining immunity from prosecution. Another officer, Carmelo Cruz, also testified after obtaining
immunity. Although Mr. Cruz did not see the shooting itself, his testimony corroborated Mr. Cartagena's in many of the details.

An earlier investigation by the Puerto Rico Justice Department upheld the police version of the shootings.

The case was investigated twice by the civil rights division of the United States Justice Department and then dropped as the officers
who were called to testify remained firm in their story that the radicals fired first.

The Federal Justice Department has entered the case again, this time to determine whether the officers perjured themselves and
obstructed justice in the investigations carried out in 1979 and in 1980.

When the essence of Mr. Cartagena's testimony was disclosed to Gov. Carlos Romero Barcelo immediately after it was given, the
Governor, who had called the police action ''heroic'' five years ago, held a news conference to announce that he had been deceived by
the police.

Mr. Romero Barcelo lost control of the Legislature to the opposition Popular Democratic Party in 1980, and the new president of the
Senate, Miguel Hernandez Agosto, ordered an investigation of the deaths at Cerro Maravilla.
 

Prosecutors Relieved of Duty

SAN JUAN, P.R., Nov. 29 (UPI) - Puerto Rico's Secretary of Justice said today that she had relieved three prosecutors of their duties
after the Senate investigating committee said they had failed to properly investigate the Cerro Marvilla shootings. A Judiciary
Committee report cited 101 specific faults in two investigations by the Puerto Rico Justice Department.