Peru: Police arrests Edgar Mejia a Shining Path top leader
Peruvian police have arrested a top commander of the Maoist Shining Path guerrilla group in an operation in which two alleged rebel fighters were killed, local media reported on Wednesday.
Edgar Mejia, also known as “Comrade Izula,” was detained at noon, Marlon Savitzky, a police chief in the Huallaga region was quoted as saying by Peru 21 in its website.
Savitzky said the rebel leader is suspected of leading guerrilla groups in two gun battles with police in the past few years in which 11 police officers and a representative of the attorney’s office were killed.
In Peru’s main coca growing regions, the Alto Huallaga, the Ene and Apurimac River Valleys, police and soldiers often clash with cocaine smugglers with links to the Shining Path group that waged a war against the state in the 1980s and 1990s.