skeleton, human tissue, remains of hair and clothing), together with empty cartridges, spent bullets, and traces of quicklime. 13. The petitioner claims that from the evidence gathered by the public prosecutor it could be concluded, in brief, that the remains found at Cieneguilla and at Km. 1.5 of the Ramiro Priale highway belonged to at least three of the victims, the students Luis Enrique Ortiz Perea, Armando Amaro Condor, and Juan Gabriel Mariños Figueroa. It was also firmly established that one of the bodies found in Cieneguilla was that of Bertila Lozano Torres, according to evidence given by dental technician, Juan Miguel Vásquez Tello. Evidence given by family members regarding remnants of clothing found also determined that some of the remains at Cieneguilla belonged to the students, Robert Teodoro Espinoza and Heráclides Pablo Meza. Likewise, it was established that some of the Cieneguilla remains belonged to Prof. Hugo Muñoz Sánchez. 14. On August 20, 1992, according to the petitioner, relatives of the victims began a number ofhabeas corpus proceedings, which were declared inadmissible. The Department of Public Prosecutions, through the eighth provincial public prosecutor in Lima, conducted no further investigations and refused to try the case in August 1993. 15. The petitioner states that on April 2, 1993, Congressman Henry Pease García announced that he had received a complaint from elements within the army. It gave a detailed report on the murder of the students in question and identified ranking army and intelligence service officials as the perpetrators of the incident. As a result, the Democratic Constituent Congress had to set up a commission to investigate the case. 16. The petitioner reports that on May 6, 1993, Lt. Gen. Rodolfo Robles Espinoza, the army’s third highest-ranking officer, published a document denouncing human rights violations by the National Intelligence Service and the Commander General of the army, specifically referring to the killings of the La Cantuta University students. After making these charges, he was removed from duty, tried, and subjected to death threats; as a result, he was forced to seek political asylum in Argentina. 17. According to the petitioner, in May 1993, almost 10 months after the incident, the military justice system decided to intervene; it opened an investigation, clearly attempting to bring the case into its jurisdiction and to prevent ranking officers implicated in the case from being investigated either by the congressional commission or, depending on how the probe developed, by civilian justice. 18. The petitioner reports that at the same time as this, in July 1993, after the Cieneguilla bodies were found, a special public prosecutor was appointed to conduct the pertinent investigations. On December 18, 1993, Special Prosecutor Víctor Cubas Villanueva presented the 16th Criminal Court in Lima with criminal charges against several officers of the Peruvian army in connection with the La Cantuta massacre of July 18, 1992. These charges were filed in spite of the strong pressure and anonymous threats exerted against the special prosecutor. 19. As of this point, alleges the petitioner, the soldiers involved were facing proceedings under both civilian and military law, and so a conflict of jurisdiction was likely. Thus, on December 17, 1993, General Narco Antonio Rodríguez Huerta, the examining military judge, submitted the jurisdictional challenge to Criminal Judge Carlo Nagno Chacon. The challenge held that military justice was investigating the La Cantuta incident, that the soldiers in question were under military jurisdiction, and that the civilian courts should refrain from dealing with the case. The following week, the aforesaid criminal judge referred the jurisdictional challenge to the Supreme Court of the Republic. 20. The petitioner states that the case documents were referred to the Court’s Criminal Division, along with the prosecutor’s ruling and the criminal judge’s report, which both agreed that the soldiers involved should be tried in civilian courts because the crimes were common crimes of civilian jurisdiction and because civilian justice could offer the necessary guarantees for a serious, unbiased investigation of the facts. On February 3, 1994, after hearing the parties’ arguments, the Court’s five-member Criminal Division declared that it was unable to reach a decision on the jurisdiction under which the soldiers charged with abducting and 3