Fujimori slams alleged prison 'silencing'

The imprisoned former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori on Saturday accused the government of trying to muzzle him and challenged authorities to allow him to be interviewed on local radio. "I am condemned to prison, and now to silence as well," Fujimori, serving a 25-year sentence for human rights abuses, said in a handwritten message entitled "Memoirs from My Incarceration," read out on RPP Radio after he was barred from receiving media visitors in prison. "I simply am not allowed to tell my truth -- to a serious and objective media," complained Fujimori. The ex president, 74, has tongue cancer and asked President Ollanta Humala in October to grant him a humanitarian pardon. The request has reopened old wounds in Peru, where 70,000 people were killed in the 1980s and 1990s in a guerrilla war launched by the Maoist Shining Path and the subsequent government crackdown. Humala defeated Fujimori's daughter, former legislator Keiko Fujimori, in a bitter run-off election in June 2011. Fujimori supporters retain considerable political clout in the nation's single chamber Congress and there has long been talk of a backroom political deal to release the ex-leader. Fujimori fled Peru to his parents' native Japan in the final days of his presidency in the midst of a massive corruption scandal, and then resigned by fax from a Tokyo hotel in late 2000. Japan subsequently granted him citizenship. Peru spent years in unsuccessful attempts to convince Tokyo to extradite Fujimori to face corruption and human rights charges. Fujimori then left Japan and headed to Santiago to prepare for a political comeback, but after extensive legal wrangling Chile extradited Fujimori to Peru to face charges in September 2007.