9 Charged as Murderers of Jesuit Priests : El Salvador: Three army officers and 5 enlisted men are ordered held for trial. The ninth is a fugitive.

SAN SALVADOR —  An army colonel, three lieutenants and five enlisted men were charged with murder today in the November slayings of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teen-age daughter.

Judge Ricardo Zamora of the 4th Penal Court ordered the eight defendants in custody held for trial on charges of murder with “premeditation and perfidy,” which carries a maximum sentence of 30 years, according to court secretary Nicolas Hernandez.

The ninth suspect deserted from the army in December and is a fugitive.

Zamora issued his ruling at the end of a 72-hour deadline that began Tuesday when the prisoners, who have been under arrest since early January, were put at the disposition of the court.

The ruling means there is enough evidence to make a case against the defendants. The ruling begins a 120-day period during which the case is prepared for trial, but this investigation phase can be delayed by motions.

Col. Guillermo Benavides, director of the Military College, is the highest-ranking armed forces officer to be accused of a crime involving human rights abuse in the 10-year-old civil war against leftist guerrillas.

The slain Jesuits were educators at the Jose Simeon Canas Central American University, one of the region’s top colleges.

The killings shocked El Salvador and the world and prompted calls in the Congress for reappraisal of the $1.5 million a day that Washington supplies in U.S. economic and military aid to this small Central American nation.

No military officer has been convicted before of a crime linked to human rights abuses, even though rightist death squads sponsored or tolerated by the armed forces killed thousands of suspected leftists in the early 1980s.

The Jesuits and the two women were slain in their campus home Nov. 16, five days after the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front guerrillas launched their biggest offensive of the war.

The far right had long accused the Jesuits of being subversive ideologues because they publicly argued that the civil war was the result of gross social injustice rather than a Communist attempt to seize power.