(Newser)
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A Guatemalan court has sentenced four former soldiers to more than 6,000 years each for the 1982 massacre of 201 men, women, and children. The conviction is the first for a massacre during the country's 36-year civil war, in which nearly a quarter of a million people were killed, the AP reports. The men were sentenced to 30 years for each murder and an additional 30 years for crimes against humanity.
The court heard that the soldiers, ordered to search a village for weapons stolen from an army base, raped and tortured residents before shooting them, strangling them, or bludgeoning them to death with sledgehammers. "We waited many years for justice," a survivor says. "I saw when they were killing people. They had us kneeling for five hours and would put their rifles in our mouths every time we asked them to stop killing the others."
