RETIRED Colombian general Mario Montoya Uribe is to be charged with responsibility for 104 extrajudicial executions as part of the “false positives” scandal, the country’s attorney general confirmed on Sunday.

The accusations centre on killings that took place between November 2007 and November 2008, including the deaths of at least five children.

Colombia’s Defence Ministry had ordered its armed forces to prioritise demobilisation and surrender of guerilla forces, but Mr Montoya ignored the command and instead promoted and incentivised combat deaths.

He is to be charged with multiple counts of aggravated homicide for his actions, the attorney general’s office said.

“General Montoya continued to exert pressure on all the country’s commanders to comply with his policy of operational results in which ‘combat deaths’ were the only criteria for evaluating the campaign,” a document from the attorney general said.

He is currently being tried by Colombia’s transitional justice court (JEP), which was established as part of the 2016 peace deal to prosecute former members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) and the armed forces for alleged war crimes.

Under the JEP, he would only serve a sentence of between five and eight years, none of which would be served in prison. But the attorney general will request that jurisdiction of his case be passed to the ordinary justice system, whereby Mr Montoya could face a 50-year prison sentence.

More than 6,000 people are believed to have been killed in the so-called false positives scandal between 1988 and 2014. Most of the victims were young men, some with learning disabilities.

Often they were taken to faraway places on the promise of a job after soldiers were paid to find targets. They were then executed.

The killings were encouraged by a government policy that offered rewards, including cash bonuses, for units that achieved high body counts. Soldiers who killed six or more people could be paid as much as 30 million pesos (£11,000).

Mr Montoya has continued to profess his innocence, claiming that he was unaware of any extrajudicial killings while he was commander of Colombia’s armed forces.

But a 2006 policy document signed by him made clear that “kills are not the most important thing, they are the only thing.”

A number of former soldiers have testified against him, but Mr Montoya’s supporters claim that they are lying to shift attention away from their own actions and to blame senior officials in a bid to receive shorter sentences.