(Adds details on officers involved, comments from fired officers and Amnesty) By Patrick Markey BOGOTA, Oct 29 (Reuters) - Colombia purged 27 army officers on Wednesday after a probe implicated the armed forces in the disappearance and killing of a group of young men whose bodies were found in mass graves hundreds of miles from their homes. The scandal taints the administration of President Alvaro Uribe, who has received billions in U.S. aid to battle guerrillas and presents his military successes as evidence his government deserves a contested U.S. free trade agreement. Uribe fired three generals and 24 officers after an investigation into whether units in Colombia's U.S.-backed security forces had killed civilians to present them as dead combatants to inflate their figures for superiors. Flanked by his top commanders, the president said an investigative commission had found negligence by commanders that could have allowed some officers to become involved in killings in league with criminal gangs. "We cannot allow any violation of human rights," Uribe said from the presidential palace. "The commission investigating this ... found that some members of the armed forces could have been involved in killings." Uribe did not provide more details of how the soldiers were involved, but he said results of the military probe would be presented to the attorney general's office. Rights groups have long accused Colombia's armed forces of extrajudicial killings to inflate their success rate in combat against rebels, outlawed paramilitaries and drug traffickers who fight the state in the country's four-decade conflict. "At last, the Colombian government is admitting there is a human rights problem in the country and that action needs to be taken to solve it. That action should be justice," said Susan Lee, Amnesty International's Americas director. PUBLIC OUTCRY Uribe's decision follows a public outcry over the disappearance of 19 young men who were recruited from their homes near Bogota by men promising jobs. They disappeared and their bodies were found last month in mass graves near the frontier with Venezuela. Their families say the men were never involved in Colombia's conflict, but the armed forces were investigating how the men were initially reported as killed in combat. "It's terrible, how can our armed forces commit these crimes," said Carmenza Gomez, mother of one of the men who disappeared from the working-class neighborhood Soacha. The three generals accepted Uribe's decision, but said they had committed no crimes. Democrats in the U.S. Congress want Uribe to do more to protect human rights, especially of labor union leaders, before they can consider approving a free trade agreement. Uribe says his government taken firm steps to protect rights. Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos recently acknowledged that some officers were pressuring soldiers to show proof of their success in combat and ordered an investigation into unofficial military "body count" policies. Uribe is popular at home for his security drive against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, Latin America's oldest insurgency. Cities and highways are safer, but thousands are still displaced each year by violence in rural areas (Reporting by Patrick Markey in Bogota, Editing by Jackie Frank)
A Colombian soldier stands guard next to home-made Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia FARC grenade launchers, seized during an operation near Cali, October 28, 2008. A total of 39 grenade launchers ...
