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U.N. Finds Lawyer Arranged His Own Death, Faked Assassination by President

By Bruce Carton

"If you are hearing or seeing this message, it is because I was assassinated by President Álvaro Colom." So begins an eerie YouTube video (above) featuring prominent Guatemalan lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg, who was, in fact, shot and killed in May of last year while riding his bicycle near his home in Guatemala City, The Washington Post reports (via the FP Legal Post). Earlier this week, however, U.N. investigators reported that Rosenberg himself had hired the hit men who killed him. The U.N.'s finding has helped to avert a brewing political crisis, one that Rosenberg apparently intended to cause: After the videotape was released, "the country descended into turmoil as conspiracy theories swirled and a constitutional crisis loomed," the Post reports. U.N. investigator Carlos Castresana told reporters on Tuesday that Rosenberg, a Harvard-educated lawyer, believed the Guatemalan government was behind the deaths of his girlfriend and her father, who was his client. Castresana said that before his death, Rosenberg bought two cellphones -- one to speak with his killers and the other to make threatening calls to his own personal phone. Shortly after the funeral last May, lawyer Robert Amsterdam reported the video message on his blog. He was surprised by...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on January 15, 2010 (boomark / email).