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LIMA: Peru's ex-president Alberto Fujimori was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison on Monday for corruption during his rule, court officials said, in the latest blow to the disgraced former leader already jailed on human rights abuses.
Fujimori had admitted responsibility in the case, in which he was accused of paying a 15-million-dollar bonus to Vladimiro Montesinos, his right-hand man during his presidency, but did not accept that awarding the money amounted to a crime.
Upon hearing the sentence he immediately announced he would appeal on the grounds it was "invalid."
This is the third sentence to be laid against the 70-year-old Fujimori, who ruled Peru from 1990 to 2000.
In April he was jailed for 25 years prison for authorising a secret army hit squad accused of killing 25 people in 1991 and 1992 - a verdict and sentencing that is under appeal.
And in December 2007, after his extradition from Chile, he began serving a six-year sentence for a separate case in which he was found guilty of abusing power.
The current case's lead prosecutor, Avelino Guillen, expressed his approval of the sentence.
Last week Guillen charged that Fujimori's efforts were "carefully planned" and that "government officials at the highest level, among them cabinet ministers, looted the state coffers."
He also said the ex-president "paid for the silence" of Montesinos in the final months of his time in power because the top aide knew all about corruption and rights abuses during Fujimori's rule.
Fujimori's presidency collapsed in a whirlwind of scandal after secretly recorded videotapes of Montesinos bribing politicians and businessmen with piles of cash began to air on television. Fujimori resigned via fax from a Tokyo hotel room in November 2000.
The bespectacled Fujimori, an agronomist by training, is the son of Japanese immigrants.
Many Peruvians credit Fujimori with crushing two leftist insurgencies that plagued the country - the Tupac Amaru guerrillas and the Maoist Shining Path rebels - during his iron-fisted presidency.
A three-judge court in Lima sentenced Fujimori to 25 years prison in April after he was found guilty of authorising the operations of an army death squad that killed 25 civilians in two bloodbaths in 1991 and 1992, and of ordering the kidnapping of a businessman and a journalist in 1992.
His 2007 conviction stemmed from his illegal order of a raid on the home of Trinidad Becerra, the wife of Montesinos.
Guillen had asked the special court for an eight-year prison term for Fujimori in the latest case, as well as 661,000 dollars in damages.
Montesinos, who fled Peru on a private yacht just before Fujimori's downfall, is currently serving a lengthy prison term. - AFP/de
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