A court in Peru has sentenced 10 retired soldiers for raping nine teenage girls and women during the country's armed conflict decades ago.
The court said the systematic rapes constituted a crime against humanity. The soldiers were sentenced to between six and 12 years in jail.
While rights groups celebrated the fact that the men were sentenced, some of the survivors said they were disappointed that the jail terms were not longer.
The rapes were committed in the Huancavelica region of Peru between 1984 and 1995, at the height of the government's fight against Maoist rebels.
The rebels, who called themselves the Shining Path, were especially active in rural regions of Peru.
The soldiers who were sentenced had been deployed to the districts of Manta and Vilca in the Andes mountains. The court found that they systematically raped local girls and women inside their army bases, at checkpoints and in the women's own homes.
Women's rights groups called the sentences - the first to be handed down to former soldiers for sexual abuses - "historic". They said it was a milestone in the fight to bring perpetrators of crimes against humanity to justice.
Rights groups hope the Manta and Vilca case will lay the groundwork for other alleged crimes from the conflict with the Shining Path to be tried.
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