Peruvian police capture rebel commander

Lima, Agency
Peruvian police captured a high-ranking commander of the Shining Path rebel group in an operation in which two other suspected guerrillas were killed, Gen. Marlon Savitzky said.

Savitzky told Canal N television that Edgar Mejia Asencio, alias "Comrade Izula," was head of security for "Comrade Artemio," the last of the original Shining Path leaders still at large.

Izula was also a "military commander in the zone of the left bank of the Huallaga (River)," the general said. "An important capture has been made."

Savitzky said two other suspected Shining Path members were killed during the operation, one of whom apparently was Izula's younger brother.

"(Izula) is wanted as a very murderous person who has participated in numerous ambushes in which our police and armed forces brothers have died," the police chief in the Upper Huallaga Valley said.

Media accounts identify Izula as one of the leaders of the Shining Path detachments that participated in December 2005 and June 2007 in ambushes that killed 11 police officers and a prosecutor.

Izula is the brother of Shining Path member Felix Mejia Asencio, who was part of Comrade Artemio's personal guard before his capture in August 2009.

The Maoist-inspired Shining Path launched its rebellion on May 17, 1980, with an attack on Chuschi, a small town in Ayacucho province.

A truth commission appointed by former President Alejandro Toledo blamed Shining Path for more than half of the nearly 70,000 deaths the panel ascribed to politically motivated violence during the two decades following the group's 1980 uprising.

Shining Path founder Abimael Guzman was captured with his top lieutenants on Sept. 12, 1992, an event that marked the "defeat" of the insurgency.

But some remnants of the group did not comply with Guzman's order more than a decade ago to end the armed struggle.

The two largest surviving factions operate in the Upper Huallaga and in the Valley of the Apurimac and Ene rivers, where coca is cultivated on a large scale to produce cocaine.

Authorities accuse the Shining Path contingents in those regions of working as enforcers for drug traffickers.