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ArgentineA former dictatorship policeman sentenced to fifteen years in prison
Extradited from France in 2019, an Argentine policeman, who allegedly participated in kidnappings or torture under the dictatorship, received a sentence for the disappearance of a single student in 1976.
The Marine Mechanics School, the most infamous detention and torture center of the dictatorship.
AFP
The former Argentine policeman MS, suspected of having participated in hundreds of kidnappings, torture and disappearances under the dictatorship (1976-1983) and extradited from France in 2019, after a long exile, was sentenced on Wednesday , to fifteen years in prison, for the disappearance of a student in 1976.
MS, 69, was found guilty of “illegitimate deprivation of liberty” and “imposition of torture on a political detainee”: Hernan Abriata, a 24-year-old architecture student and Peronist activist, kidnapped in October 1976 and missing since, according to the judgment of a court in Buenos Aires, excerpts of which were published by the official Telam agency.
Former federal police inspector in Buenos Aires, the defendant appeared in September, judged for the only file of Abriata, although he is suspected of having been one of the most active agents of the ESMA, the Marine Engineering School, one wing of which became the dictatorship’s most notorious detention and torture center.
He was extradited from France in December 2019, after eight years of legal battle, with appeals before the Council of State and the Constitutional Council in particular, and has since been placed in preventive detention in Argentina.
Sentences of twenty years in prison to life imprisonment had been demanded by the Public Ministry and the civil parties, including the family of Hernan Abriata, the Secretariat for Human Rights and ESMA survivors.
He denies
MS heard the sentence, by teleconference, from his cell in the Campo de Mayo military prison. Previously, he had one last time proclaimed his innocence, and claimed to have had nothing to do with ESMA. As at the start of the trial when, defiantly, he called himself an “exceptional prisoner”, the victim of a “political trial”, to make him “bear political responsibility for the violence of that time”.
“At this trial, my freedom and reputation were put at risk. At times, the Court became a stage, where the speeches were political and I could not defend myself,” he said on Wednesday.
Exiled to France in 1985, after the fall of the junta, MS had built a new life there, becoming a consultant on defense and security issues. He had taught in particular at the Institute of Advanced Studies of Latin America, in Paris. He had obtained French nationality in 1997 but, not being French at the material time, could be extradited. He had been flushed out following a press article, and via a student, daughter of Argentine exiles, who had taken one of his courses at the Sorbonne. Former inmates had recognized him from photos.
Since the dictatorship’s trials resumed in 2006, after more than a decade of highly controversial amnesty measures and laws, more than 1,110 people have been convicted of crimes against humanity. The Argentine dictatorship has caused, according to NGOs, nearly 30,000 dead or missing. Proceedings remain in progress against more than 600 others, either at the trial stage or still under investigation, according to the specialized prosecution.
(AFP)