Guatemala Mass Marks Bishop's Death Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit Guatemala Mass Marks Bishop's Death (c) The Associated Press By ALFONSO ANZUETO GUATEMALA CITY (AP) - Some 60,000 worshippers gathered at the capital's main cathedral Sunday to remember human rights crusader Bishop Juan Gerardi on the eve of the first anniversary of his killing. The gates to Gerardi's tomb in the Metropolitan Cathedral are to be opened Monday -- exactly one year after his April 26, 1998 death -- for people to place flowers there, and a ``march against impunity'' is scheduled for later that day to pressure authorities to find those responsible bludgeoning the Roman Catholic official to death. Many have accused the army of being behind Gerardi's killing. He was slain two days after he presented a human rights report blaming the army and paramilitary patrols for the vast majority of human rights abuses during Guatemala's 36-year civil war. Gerardi's fellow bishops, who led the crowd in the cathedral through Mass, appeared to have few doubts about why he was killed. ``They killed him because he hated injustice and loved equality, they killed him for not remaining insensitive to the pain of his people, a people humiliated, impoverished, exploited and also massacred,'' said Gerardo Flores, Bishop of Las Verapaces province, where Gerardi once served as bishop and where huge numbers of civilians were killed in the conflict. ``He was a great defender of liberty and he carried out beautiful pastoral work among the indigenous peoples, it's an example for the entire country,'' Flores said. An estimated 200,000 people were killed or disappeared in the civil war, which ended with the signing of peace accords between the government and leftist rebels in 1996. Long columns of parishioners, many dressed in four colors -- white, red, orange and green, representing the four points of the compass -- filed into the city's main square in front of the Cathedral to listen to the mass. On Friday, the chief prosecutor in the murder case asked for DNA samples from 12 Guatemalan soldiers, one of the first signs that the military's possible involvement in the slaying is being seriously investigated. In the year since his death, previous prosecutors had focused their investigations almost exclusively on a parish priest who lived at the house, even as rights activists accused them of ignoring possible evidence of military involvement. In a Thursday meeting with President Alvaro Arzu Irigoyen at the Vatican, Pope John Paul II stressed the need to solve the slaying of Bishop Gerardi. AP-NY-04-25-99 1824EDT ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytcamer-05.01.99-13:34:53-2105