claiming to be officials of the Attorney General’s Office (supra para. 89). This new series of threats and harassment was reported by both the Colombian Commission of Jurists (supra paras. 90) and by Mr. Vélez Restrepo, who even appeared personally before the Human Rights Council of the Presidency of the Republic on October 3, 1997. Two days later he received a written death threat, which caused him “great fear that something would happen,” and the following day he suffered an attempted deprivation of liberty (supra para. 94). 169. The Court notes that, according to the evidence provided to the Court, the period of approximately six months when Mr. Vélez Restrepo and his family did not receive threats coincides with the time during which Mr. Vélez Restrepo did not testify or take any other measure in the ongoing investigations, and when he and his family moved house. This reveals the said temporal correlation between the frequency and intensification of the threats and the measures taken by Mr. Vélez to obtain the investigation and punishment of the soldiers who attacked him on August 29, 1996. 170. For this Court, a third important piece of evidence is that neither the State in its arguments, nor the authorities in charge of the investigations have offered or identified any alternative hypothesis that could explain the origin of the threats, harassment, and attempted deprivation of liberty. In this regard, to assist in its deliberations, the Court asked the State to explain which individuals, other than the soldiers who attacked Mr. Velez in Caquetá on August 1996, could have had an interest in threatening him to the point that he had to leave the country.177 Moreover, it should be emphasized that, to the contrary, in all the statements that Mr. Vélez Restrepo has made that form part of the body of evidence in this case, he has been consistent in stating that the threats, harassment and attempted deprivation of liberty originated “from the soldiers, and were related to the Caquetá incident.” Before this Court, Mr. Vélez Restrepo stated that there was no other reason that could explain the origin of those acts. 171. The Court finds that these indications are also confirmed by the information provided in the testimony of Mr. Tulande, expert witness proposed by the State, who indicated that a certain journalist also received threats in connection with the “decisive role” she played in obtaining and disseminating the video recording made by Mr. Vélez Restrepo on August 29, 1996. The expert witness even provided the recording of the interview he had conducted with that journalist,178 in which she stated that, on the day after she disseminated the video, she received a threatening telephone call at the hotel where she was staying in Caquetá, and that she “assumes that it was made by those who attacked Richard […], who were the soldiers who beat him,” an incident she said that she had witnessed personally. Also, the journalist explained that, as a preventive measure, the news station for which she worked decided to “take [her] out of the region,” following which she received no further threats or intimidation in this regard. 177 The response to the request for helpful evidence, submitted by the State on June 22, 2012, as regards the question “about other possible hypothesis that may have been included in the criminal investigations,” was that both the investigation into the threats and the one into the alleged attempted kidnapping “were at the preliminary inquiry stage […];” that, in “the investigation into the alleged threats […] a writ of prohibition had been issued that had resulted in the statute of limitations coming into effect,” and that “the inquiry into the presumed conduct of attempted kidnapping was at a preliminary stage, without it having been possible to determine, to date, who is or are responsible for this act, or its motive.“ 178 Recording containing the interview with the journalist Maribel Osorio (presented by expert witness José Francisco Tulande and forwarded by the State with the brief of March 28, 2012, merits file, tome III, folio 1860). 52