GUATEMALA CITY – A trove of newly discovered police documents confirms Guatemala’s infamous National Police helped identify and kill leftists during the country’s 36-year civil war.

Amid the piles of molding files – 48 million in all – investigators have found lists of thousands of people, classified under the labels “disappeared,” “assassinated” and “political detainee.”

Some files hold fingerprints of the dead. Many include pictures of corpses – some showing signs of torture, with their hands tied behind their backs or bullet holes in their heads.

“They logged people who turned up dead, and some were even photographed. From there, we can identify the disappeared,” said Gustavo Meono, leader of 20 investigators going through the files.

He said the evidence so far supports a U.N. truth commission’s finding that the National Police helped the military track down leftist activists and, in some cases, aided in their killing.

The files were found by human rights prosecutors in June while they searched for explosives in a musty police building in Guatemala City. The Associated Press was given access to the files, stacked as high as the ceiling and including police logs and reports on robberies and other more mundane crimes. Some date back to 1900.

Guatemala has reluctantly accepted reports by the United Nations and the Roman Catholic Church that the country’s security forces carried out massacres, torture and political killings during the civil war.

But the new files are expected to shed light on details of the abuses and possibly help relatives learn what happened to some of the estimated 40,000 people who disappeared during the war, most from 1975-85.

The army was responsible for most of the killings during the 1960-1996 civil war, which left an estimated 200,000 people dead. But the U.N. commission, which spent more than two years investigating the war’s human rights abuses, found the National Police supported the military with information and intelligence.

When the civil war reached Guatemala City, the commission found, the police – mostly detectives – carried out some killings themselves.

Police agents in charge of the archive were amazed to discover the files they believed to be “old papers” were actually a treasure trove for investigators.

“The thing is, no one knew about this,” Meono said. “In 1997, police told the U.N. truth commission that the files didn’t exist.”

Associated Press

Workers in Guatemala’s human rights office inspect police documents found in Guatemala City.