GUATEMALA CITY — A former soldier implicated Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina in civil war atrocities on Thursday during the trial of former U.S.-backed military strongman Efrain Rios Montt, proceedings that have heard witnesses recount a litany of horrors.

Hugo Reyes, a soldier who was a mechanic in an engineering brigade in the area where atrocities were carried out, told the court that Perez Molina, then an army major, ordered soldiers to burn and pillage during Guatemala’s dirty war with leftist guerrillas in the 1980s.

“The soldiers, on orders from Major `Tito Arias,’ better known as Otto Perez Molina … coordinated the burning and looting, in order to later execute people,” Reyes told the court by video link.

Perez Molina, who retired as a general, was elected president for the conservative Patriotic Party and assumed office on Jan. 14, 2012.

The secretary general of the presidency, Gustavo Martinez, called the testimony “poorly intentioned declarations and in bad faith.” He said the presidency reserves the right to take action against Reyes.

In line with the gruesome testimony that has marked the trial of Rios Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, Reyes described what happened in one massacre in the early 1980s.

“The people who were to be executed arrived at the camp beaten, tortured, their tongues cut out, their fingernails pulled out,” he said.

Rios Montt is on trial along with his former head of intelligence in connection with the deaths of 1,771 Mayan Indians during the military dictatorship he led from March 23, 1982 to Aug. 8, 1983, during which he led a U.S.-backed counterinsurgency against guerrillas.

The court also heard testimony from the victims of massacres. Some told the judges about the shelling of villages, beheadings and body parts kicked around like soccer balls.

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