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MEXICO CITY (AP) -- A former Sandinista guerrilla leader who once led a raid that helped free then rebel and now President Daniel Ortega from prison has died, his family announced Saturday, eight months after Ortega's government arrested him and dozens of other Nicaraguan opposition leaders.
Hugo Torres died at age 73, relatives said.
Torres was the first of a large group of opposition leaders rounded up in a 2021 crackdown to die. It was unclear if his death was hastened by conditions in prison. He died at a hospital in Managua, the capital, "of illnesses he had," according to a statement by government prosecutors.
Torres was a leading commander of the 1970s Sandinista revolution who broke with Ortega more than 20 years ago to found the Sandinista Renovation Movement.
Torres was one of 46 opposition figures and presidential hopefuls jailed by Ortega in May and June, to clear the way for his almost unopposed re-election on Nov. 7.
Three of Torres' children issued a statement announcing their father's death. They did not give a cause, and said that, in accordance with their father's wishes there would no public funeral or ceremony.
The prosecutors office said that when it learned Torres was seriously ill, the office "asked judicial authorities to suspend the start of his oral public trial for humanitarian reasons."
The trials in fact are not public and are held in prison, in many cases with only the defendant's lawyer allowed to be present. Some trials last only a few hours.
Prosecutors had justified Torres' arrest by charging him, along with most of the other imprisoned opposition leaders, with "conspiracy to undermine national integrity."
On June 13 last year, Torres predicted his own arrest in an interview with The Associated Press after seeing drones flying around his home. "This interview may be the last one I give," Torres said. "I am here, waiting for them to come for me."
Torres was a guerrilla commander who fought alongside Ortega during Nicaragua's civil war and later a general with the Nicaraguan army. He was part of the effort to transform the Sandinista Popular Army created after the rebels' 1979 victory into a professional Nicaraguan Army in the 1990s.
His death may prove to be a major embarrassment to Ortega; Torres got Ortega sprung from jail in 1974 by raiding the home of a close ally of then-dictator Anastasio Somoza. Ortega had been jailed for a botched bank robbery in Managua, the capital, years before.
In a video he posted hours before his arrest in June, Torres said "46 years ago I risked my life to get Daniel Ortega and other political-prisoner colleagues out of prison."
"I am 73, and I never thought that at this stage of my life I was going to be fighting against another dictatorship, now more brutal, more unscrupulous, more irrational and more autocratic than the Somoza dictatorship," Torres said.