Raúl Reyes’s laptops belonged to Raúl Reyes

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INTERPOL has confirmed it: the files and contents of the three laptops seized in FARC strongman Raúl Reyes’s camp were not modified, nor adultered or deleted by the Colombian authorities.

This is the second blow against FARC and its allies in a little more than two months, because INTERPOL’s certification implies an independent warranty that the proofs found at the Ecuadorian camp were not contaminated. If the Colombian government had not taken the decision to ask an audit on the devices and their content, the opposition -specially the people mentioned in the Reyes dossier- would be screaming that Uribe and his "thugs" manipulated the information to start a persecution on his political opponents, for sure.

Another crucial point is that Ronald Kenneth Noble, INTERPOL’s Secretary-General, stated that the laptops belonged to FARC and specifically to Raúl Reyes. But, how can INTERPOL guarantee that the terrorist owned the laptops and the USB flash memories? The same way an investigation can certify a gun was fired by a specific individual, that is, through the rigour of the chain of custody.

The involved and their puppies, scared, have pointed that the chain of custody of Raúl Reyes’s devices was broken and therefore they would be useless before a judge’s stand. But they are wrong. Let’s start at the beginning: the chain of custody, according to Colombia’s General Attorney’s Office, "is the application of a series of rules intended to insure, pack, and protect each probative material element in order to avoid its destruction, supplanting, or contamination."

This means that the chain of custody begins when the official packs and labels the probative material at the place where the evidence is located, in this case Raúl Reyes’s laptops.

After the operation in Ecuadorian soil, specialized units of the Colombian National Police abseiled down to the place and when they found the devices, they were properly labelled and stored. Anyway, if the laptops were not protected in special bags but in ordinary battle backpacks, the chain of custody would still be valid, because the important thing was not the physical preserving of probative elements (DNA, prints, blood, etc.) but the conservation of the contents, because of that the transportation medium turns to be irrelevant.

Besides, the Attorney’s Office’s instruction manual says this: "In order to demonstrate the material’s authenticity, the chain of custody is applied taking into account both the identity factors, original status, recollection, preservation, packing and shipping conditions; as the places and dates of stay and changes every custodian. The names and the identifications of every person who had been in contact with those elements will be registered."

Evidently this was conformed, because the evidences (the documents) were not contaminated, adulterated, or deleted by the authorities having under their custody the devices. Furthermore: INTERPOL’s intervention perfectly fits in the technical survey it should be carried out before the evidences, guaranteeing that an independent organization, with more than 180 countries as its members, made the respective technical validation process of the evidences. The Attorney’s Office states the following:

“Both judicial police and the experts will certify the chain of custody. Such certification is the affirmation that the element found at the place, date and hour indicated in the label is the one collected by the judicial police and is the same taken to the laboratory to be examined by the expert.”

So far, the chain of custody was the following: the Police collected, packed and labelled the evidences. The custodians travelled 24 HOURS LATER to Bogotá to hand the material to their commander, Colombian National Police’s director, general Óscar Naranjo. The next day, that custodian delivered the material to INTERPOL for it to evaluate the evidences and determine if they were contaminated and adulterated or not. In this case INTERPOL acted as a forensic laboratory to determinate the purity of the evidence. The important thing is that INTERPOL has guaranteed that during all that time, the evidences contained in Raúl Reyes’s devices were not contaminated and that the custodians worked professionally and rigorously.

In the last few hours INTERPOL delivered the certification and pointed out that it was ceding the chain of custody to the General Attorney’s Office, which ends the proof validation phase and starts the judicialization process which evaluates the quality and the scope of them against those people who turn out to be involved by the evidences.

Things being so, the failure of the chain of custody, which some hopeful people pointed as the debacle of the so-called FARC-politics process, was an illusion quickly dispelled by INTERPOL, the Attorney’s Office and the professionalism of the Colombian National Police, whose director had proposed the participation of the international organization in the technical evaluation of the devices… FARC’s allies ran out of a way to refute the evidence which within a short time should take them before the justice.

CLOSING NOTE: Why Chávez and Correa entirely accepted INTERPOL’s survey and now they say they do not believe in the certification?

*The author is a Colombian journalist who keeps since 2005 the Sistema Informativo Atrabilioso, one of the oldest and most important centre-right political blogs in Colombia, where this article was originally published 15 May 2008. Translated by Julián Ortega Martínez

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