Victims' families stunned by 'injustice' of new law

Gladys Rubina is "outraged" that the soldiers who killed her sister in a massacre three decades ago, during Peru's bloody war between the government and left-wing rebels, could walk free.

Last month, the country adopted a statute of limitations for crimes against humanity committed before 2002.

The law will effectively shut down hundreds of investigations into alleged crimes committed during a conflict that ran from 1980 to 2000 and claimed an estimated 69 000 lives.

"I feel outraged, it makes a mockery of us, they're giving a second chance to the murderers of our relatives," Rubina told AFP at a monument in Lima that marks one of the darkest periods in Peruvian history.

The conflict saw the state battling leftist insurgent groups, notably the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas, with atrocities and massacres committed by both sides. Rubina, 50, lost her 16-yearold sister Nelly in one of the most high-profile cases now headed for judicial oblivion.