El Salvador's president says military files on civil war massacre were destroyed

SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) - Salvadoran military files from the time of a 1981 massacre of 1,000 people during the country's civil war have been mostly destroyed, said El Salvador's president, who vowed to make the few surviving documents public in an effort to bring justice in the case.

In the incident, one of the worst tragedies of the war that pitted leftist guerrillas against the U.S.-backed Salvadoran army, soldiers executed unarmed villagers of El Mozote and surrounding hamlets in eastern El Salvador as they searched for guerrillas, according to a U.N. report.