32 Procedural activity of the petitioners 154. The Commission notes that the petitioners filed a complaint with the Public Prosecution Service on August 15, 1994 – in other words, 11 days after the incident which, by its very nature, should have been investigated on an ex officio basis. It also notes that on October 19 and 25, 1994, the parents of Zulema Tarazona Arrieta and Norma Teresa Pérez Chávez applied to appear as civil complainants in the proceedings before the regular courts, that their requests were accepted by the 27th Criminal Court of Lima on January 11, 1995, almost three months later, and that they each gave a statement. 155. The Commission notes that two days after Congress passed Law No. 26479 on June 14, 1995, which granted amnesty to military, police, or civil personnel involved in human rights violations committed between May 1980 and the date of the law’s enactment, the petitioners applied to the 27th Provincial Criminal Prosecutor of Lima requesting that the Amnesty Law not be applied in the case at hand, on the grounds that it was patently unconstitutional; however, that was not taken into consideration in the Prosecutor’s report on the admissibility of the motion of res judicata based on the military courts’ resolution of June 20, 1995, whereby an amnesty was extended to the accused in this case, or in the resolution upholding the motion of res judicata before the regular courts. In addition, the Commission notes that under military law, the petitioners were unable to appear in the proceedings before the military courts. 156. It has also been established before the Commission that it was the petitioners who requested the reopening of the case on April 19, 2001 – that is, almost seven years after the incident – on the basis of the Inter-American Court’s judgment in the case of Barrios Altos v. Peru of March 14, 2001. That request was declined by the Prosecutor’s Office on September 10, 2001, for failing to comply with the legally established procedure for legalizing supranational judgments; subsequently, after the required legal formalities had been met, the case was ordered to be removed from the archive on January 21, 2003: in other words, almost two years after the request. 157. In addition, the Commission notes that once the Prosecutor’s Office filed charges against Sergeant Second-Class Evangelista Pinedo on July 14, 2006, and since he had been a fugitive from justice since the reopening of the case in 2003, the petitioners asked the President of the National Criminal Chamber, on three occasions during 2007 and 2008, to update the arrest warrant and to pursue various formalities to locate him, given the lack of activity on the part of the authorities. 158. In addition, the Commission notes that according to the established facts, once the conviction became final on December 24, 2008, the petitioners had to ask the Judge of the Fourth Supraprovincial Criminal Court on four occasions – April 27, during June, August 4, and November 19, 2009 – to order the Peruvian Army to pay the compensation amount in its capacity as responsible third party in order for the redress to be made effective. 159. Consequently, the Commission believes that the petitioners acted in a way compatible with civil complainants as established in Peruvian law at the time and, rather than hindering the process, they worked in pursuit of its conclusion. Actions of the authorities 160. The Commission has seen, from the facts established in the case at hand that criminal proceedings were brought before the military and regular courts. This was in spite of the military authorities’ initial determination that it was not a service-related offense or military crime, in that they identified it as negligent homicide, in that the alleged victims were civilians and not combatants, and in that the patrol was not authorized to stop vehicles or to open fire, but merely to ask passersby for their papers. 161. The Commission notes that in cases such as the one at hand, in which two people were killed and another injured as a result of the actions of a state agent, it is of particular importance “that the competent authorities adopt all reasonable measures to guarantee the necessary probative material in