Twenty-four years ago a bomb exploded in a press conference at the Rio San Juan jungle headquarters of anti-Sandinista guerrilla leader Eden Pastora, killing three journalists – including Tico Times staffer Linda Frazier – and injuring 22 others.

Now a veteran Swedish journalist who claims to be a survivor of the May 30, 1984, bombing at La Penca, Nicaragua, has come forward to accuse various high-level Sandinistas of masterminding the plot.

Peter Torbiornsson, who covered the Sandinista revolution and contra war for Swedish media in the 1980s, returned to Nicaragua after being away for 18 years to accuse former Interior Minister Tomás Borge (currently ambassador to Peru), former chief of intelligence, Renán Montero, and former chief of counterintelligence, Lenín Cerna, of “crimes against humanity,” according to an interview yesterday in the daily El Nuevo Diario.

Torbiornsson acknowledges he was a former sympathizer of the leftwing Sandinista revolution.

But he says those sentiments were exploited by the Sandinista intelligence machine when a month before the bombing, Montero contacted the Swedish journalist and asked him for help introducing another journalist to contacts across the border in Costa Rica.

The ex-intelligence chief told Torbiornsson the man was a Danish journalist named Per Anker Hansen.

Torbiornsson, based in Costa Rica at the time, said he obliged. He ended up living for awhile with Hansen, whom he says he suspected of being a spy for the Sandinistas.

Hansen, in fact, turned out to be Argentine Marxist Roberto Vital Gaguine, who later carried a remote-controlled bomb to the La Penca press conference in an attempt to kill Pastora.

The bomb, which was placed inside a camera case under the table where Pastora and the journalists sat, got knocked over before detonating, and exploded in the wrong direction. Pastora was injured but survived, while others, including The Tico Times' Frazier, bled to death on the floor waiting for help that never came.

Subsequent media investigations found that Vital died in 1989 in an attack on a military barracks in Argentina. But it was never entirely clear whom he had been working for.

Torbiornsson alleges the Sandinista inner circle, including President Daniel Ortega, knows the truth about the La Penca bombing.

“Sooner or later the truth has to be known,” Torbirnsson told El Nuevo Diario, in an interview that the newspaper apparently waited to run until the journalist had left the country. “I didn't feel good about myself … I think it is the moment to tell the truth about this.”