[5] Major drug traffickers had issued death threats against the Supreme Court Justices since 1985, with the intention of forcing them to rule out the Extradition Treaty with the United States.

[6] According to the investigation carried out by the Special Court of Instruction created by decree 3300 of 1985, state security agencies and even the media had varying levels of knowledge about the siege prior to the attack.

[9] Additionally, suspicion exists regarding the speed of the military's response, seen in the prompt arrival of armored cars, despite the great distance between their base and the Palace of Justice.

The witness said that days before the takeover of the Palace of Justice, all intelligence personnel were quartered under the warning that something was going to happen and that an operational command had already been set up in the Casa del Florero.

[11] The guerrillas killed security guards Eulogio Blanco and Gerardo Díaz Arbeláez and building manager Jorge Tadeo Mayo Castro.

[18] A group of guerrillas led by Commander Luis Otero got to the fourth floor and kidnapped the President of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Alfonso Reyes Echandía.

[citation needed] The M-19 rebels freed State Councillor Reynaldo Arciniegas at 8:30am, with a message for the government to allow the entry of the Red Cross and initiate dialogue.

Tests proved that if fired by a soldier standing within twenty feet of wood-lined walls of the library that housed Colombian legal archives, the intense heat generated by the rocket's rear blast could have ignited the wooden paneling.

In any event, in a shelved area stacked high with old papers, files, books, and newspapers, the quantity of explosives used by the military virtually guaranteed a conflagration.

Colombia's Armed Forces did not have antiterrorist units specifically trained for urban operations before the siege, and some partially blamed the outcome on the relative inexperience of the personnel assigned to the task.

[citation needed] The magistrates killed were:[23] Shortly after the siege, the U.S. and Colombian Justice Minister Enrique Parejo asserted that drug traffickers had financed the operation in order to get rid of various criminal files that were lost during the event, hoping to avoid extradition.

[24] Less than a week after the events, Humberto Murica, a retired Supreme Court Judge who had survived the siege stated to the Washington Post that he rejected claims that M19 was concerned with the files based on the militants' conversations.

[26] The Special Commission of Inquiry, established by the Betancur government after intense public pressure,[27] released a June 1986 report which concluded that the destruction of files was not a goal of the M19 operation.

Petro says that the surviving members of the M-19 do admit to their share of responsibility for the tragic events of the siege, on behalf of the entire organization, but deny any links to the drug trade.

Some have blamed President Belisario Betancur for not taking the necessary actions or for failing to negotiate, and others have commented on the possibility of a sort of de facto "24-hour coup", during which the military was in control of the situation.

The book also asserts that, after the siege was over, some twenty-eight bodies were dumped into a mass grave and apparently soaked with acid, in order to make identification difficult.

Carrigan argued that the bodies of the victims of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano eruption, which buried the city of Armero and killed more than 20,000 people, were dumped into the same mass grave, making any further forensic investigations impractical.

[48] On 22 August 2006, Attorney General Mario Iguarán announced that former Colonel Edilberto Sánchez, former B-2 intelligence chief of the Army's Thirteenth Brigade, would be summoned for questioning and investigated for the crimes of kidnapping and forced disappearance.

Public prosecutors were to reopen the case after examining video tape recordings and identifying cafeteria manager Carlos Augusto Rodríguez being taken outside of the Palace of Justice alive by a soldier, together with other former M-19 hostages.

[52] In the Colombian Consulate in Miami, under oath, she described the relationship of the drug lord with the Sandinista Government of Nicaragua[53][54] and the M-19; also, a meeting of Escobar with the rebel commander Ivan Marino Ospina, in which she had been present, two weeks before the latter was killed by the Army, on August 28, 1985.

According to her, Escobar identified the victims as the employees of the cafeteria of the Palace and two rebel women that had been detained by the Army after the siege, and had been tortured and disappeared on orders of colonel Edilberto Sánchez, director of B-2, Military Intelligence.

[57][58] On radio stations,[59] Vallejo accused the office of the Colombian Attorney General of filtering it to the media and adulterating the contents, to protect the military and the former presidential candidate Alberto Santofimio, Escobar's political ally.

[37] María Stella Jara, the judge that handed the sentence to Colonel Plazas left the country after receiving multiple death threats to her and her son.

The declaration was influenced by a revisiting of the case in the Supreme Court when the validity of testimonies of four witnesses came into question, along with absence of conclusive evidence to prove guilty in the charges brought again Plazas Vega.