News In Brief
| San Salvador
Duarte: rebel leaders offered 'nothing serious' in last talks
President Jose Napoleon Duarte said Saturday that rebel leaders offered ''nothing serious'' at the second round of peace Friday, and they rejected a Christmas truce in the five-year civil war. A joint communique after the 12-hour meeting in Ayagualo said both sides had agreed, however, to allow the free movement of traffic from Dec. 23 to Jan. 3. The two negotiating teams of four men each did not set a date for a third round of talks, which Duarte said would not be held before January.
Duarte said Saturday he had fired an Army officer named in the 1981 killings of two US labor advisers and a Salvadorean land-reform official. Charges against Lt. Rodolfo Lopez Sibrian had been dismissed because testimony by two corporals who said he had ordered them to carry out the killings could not be used in court.
