Bogotá, September 8 (teleSUR-RHC)-- The family members of Colombian human rights lawyer Jesus Maria Valle Jaramillo are demanding investigations into his murder more than a decade ago include former President Alvaro Uribe.

Valle devoted his life to defending poor farmers from his home region of Ituango and revealing the atrocities committed against its people by paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño, in collusion with civil and military authorities.

Uribe was the governor of the northeastern department of Antioquia, where Valle was working at the time that the advocate was killed in his legal office in 1998 by hitmen.

While now-Senator Uribe has been suspected of involvement in this case and other assassinations of social movement leaders, it was the statements of a former paramilitary boss, Diego Fernando Murillo Bejarano, alias “Don Berna,” which prompted Jaramillo’s relatives to take action.

According to Murillo, Valle’s death would have been ordered by the then secretary of the government of Antioquia, Pedro Juan Moreno, who was since killed in an airplane crash.

The lawyer’s nephew, Mauricio Herrera Valle, said that if Pedro Juan Moreno was the mastermind of the murder of his uncle, the then-governor of Antioquia, Uribe, would have known about the planned hit.