| US sniffer dogs slept in hotel beds in Colombia |
WASHINGTON US security personnel entangled in a prostitution scandal in Colombia in April irritated hotel staff by letting bomb detection dogs sleep in hotel beds and soil the linens, a US military report released on Friday said.
Hotel guests “thought to be American” were “bothering and propositioning” college-age female greeters working at the hotel for the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said the report by the US military’s Southern Command.
The report gave details of how unhappy hotel staff contacted US officials the day before President Barack Obama arrived in Cartagena, Colombia, to complain of misbehaviour by the US Secret Service and US military troops who were there to help provide security for the Summit of the Americas.
Twelve US military service members also brought “foreign national female guests” to their hotel rooms in Cartagena, according to the report.
Prostitution is legal in Colombia and the women had been registered at the hotel as overnight guests. What bothered the staff at the Hotel Caribe, a luxurious colonial-style building, was that some of the Americans’ guests stayed in the rooms past 6am, when hotel policy said they should be gone.
“El Caribe Hotel allows overnight guests only from 2300 to 0600 because the hotel does not want families and other registered guests to witness their presence,” the report said. After this rule was broken by the Americans, the hotel banned overnight guests for the duration of the summit.
US officials met hotel staff twice on April 12 to hear their complaints. One concern was that “explosive detection dog handlers were allowing their animals to sleep in hotel beds, soil the linens, and urinate and defecate in inappropriate locations on the hotel grounds, leaving the waste,” the military report said.
The military report concluded that there was no evidence that service members’ interaction with the women threatened US national security.
“There is no evidence that any of the female guests signed in to hotels by military members to el Caribe Hotel were part of a human trafficking network or associated with the Farc or any other terrorist or drug trafficking organisation,” it said.
Eight of the women were interviewed in the presence of US personnel, the military report said. The Colombian police performed a background check on 11 of the women, and none had a criminal record.
However, a 12th woman remains unidentified, the report said.
Reuters
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