Ex-Salvadoran official asks Supreme Court to bar extradition

WASHINGTON – A former high-ranking Salvadoran official is asking the Supreme Court to block his extradition to Spain. The former official has been indicted in connection with the killing of Jesuit priests, most of them Spaniards, in El Salvador in 1989.

Seventy-six-year-old Inocente Orlando Montano (Een-o-SEN-teh Or-LAHN-do Mon-TAH-no) was once El Salvador’s vice minister of public security. He has been in U.S. custody for more than four years. He says he should not be turned over to Spain because he had no role in the killings of six priests and two employees at a Jesuit university in San Salvador.

He also says he is ill and has never set foot in Spain.

A United Nations commission has said Montano took part in a meeting that led to the killings.