248. The Commission held that the MRTA members who had captured the residence of the Japanese ambassador “were legitimate military targets during the time they were actively participating in the confrontation” and that those who “had surrendered, or had been captured o wounded and had ceased hostile acts were effectively in the power of agents of the Peruvian State, who from the legal standpoint, were now barred from attacking them or subjecting them to other acts of violence,” because once they were hors de combat, they were “holders of the non-derogable guarantees of humane treatment stipulated in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and Article 4 of the American Convention.” It added, “while police officers may legitimately use lethal force in the conduct of their duties, it should be an exceptional measure[,] […] planned and limited proportionally by the authorities, such that they proceed to the ‘use of force or instruments of coercion only after all other forms of control have been attempted and have failed.’” 249. The Commission commented, with regard to the death of Eduardo Nicolás Cruz Sánchez, alias “Tito”, that “the testimonies of former hostage Hidetaka Ogura, as well as statements by police officers Raúl Robles Reynoso and Marcial Teodorico Torres Arteaga, heads of security in the house contiguous to the ambassador's residence, [were] consistent in claiming that […] he had left the premises hiding among a group of hostages, but was found out. The officers in charge therefore […] tied his hands, pushed him to the floor and notified their commanding officer, Colonel Zamudio Aliaga, about his presence, upon which a commando appeared and took him back inside the ambassador’s residence. [A]t the time he was turned over to the military officer and taken back into the ambassador’s residence, Eduardo Nicolás Cruz Sánchez was alive.” The Commission added that his body had appeared that same night inside the ambassador’s residence “with a bullet to the lower part of the neck and, as stated in the report on removal of the body, with ‘a grenade [in his hand] that he had not thrown.’” The Commission pointed to the partial selective autopsy performed the day after the confrontation, which found that Eduardo Nicolás Cruz Sánchez “had received a ‘severe injury’ from the projectile of a firearm to the right side of the head”; the 2001 autopsies then conducted a trajectory analysis of the wound and posited that Cruz Sánchez “had to have been immobile and then shot at” and that he was “on a lower plane than the shooter, who was behind him and to [his] left.” According to the Commission, “[t]he forensic test on the wounds of Eduardo Nicolás Cruz Sánchez are consistent with extrajudicial execution.” 250. To this should be added the fact that, according to the Commission, “there were grounds to believe that the scene of his death had been tampered with” and that the military team had “blocke[d] the timely performance of the first procedures following the deaths of the MRTA members[, which] undermined the subsequent investigations, because even though new, more complete expert reports were prepared four years after the facts, the passage of time and the flaws in the first autopsies hindered the completion of a full analysis.” 251. The Commission discussed the deaths of Meléndez Cueva and Peceros Pedraza and pointed to several items of evidence suggested that both had been victims of extrajudicial execution, such as (i) the testimony of Hidetaka Ogura, who claimed that he had seen these MRTA members alive and surrounded by military personnel; (ii) the report on the removal of the bodies, which made no mention of whether the MRTA guerrillas were armed, or whether weapons had been found near the bodies; (iii) the fact that a member of the Explosive Deactivation Unit who later entered the room where the bodies of the MRTA members were found said that they had been killed without putting up any resistance, as he did not see “any weapons around them, and the positions in which they were found bore this out;” (iv) these members of the MRTA had received multiple bullets to vital parts of the body, as would be consistent with the technique of selective shooting, the purpose of which is to “eliminate the enemy, and not neutralize him, even if he has surrendered;” (v) testimonies delivered by

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