An Argentine ex-police officer linked to the murder of hundreds of people during the country’s “dirty war” arrived in Buenos Aires on Monday, after France extradited him to face trial over the disappearance of a student.
Mario Sandoval was arrested Wednesday at his home near Paris, after French authorities gave the final go-ahead for his extradition, ending an eight-year legal battle.
The 66-year-old who had been living in France since 1985 and obtained French citizenship with few aware of his full identity was sent back on a plane that left Paris around midnight on Sunday.
Wearing a dark cap and a blue fleece jacket, the bespectacled and slightly bowed Sandoval was escorted through Ezeiza airport on his arrival in Buenos Aires, a police officer holding each arm. An overcoat hung over his handcuffed hands.
SWAT police with automatic weapons flanked the group as he was led to a waiting police car.
“Everything happened as expected,” a lawyer for the Argentine state told AFP.
Argentina suspects that Sandoval took part in more than 500 cases of kidnappings, torture and murder at a time when some 30,000 were “disappeared” during the 1976-83 military dictatorship.
But the extradition concerns only the alleged kidnapping in October 1976 of Hernan Abriata, an architecture student whose body has never been found.
Argentine authorities say investigators have several witness accounts linking Sandoval — known there as the “butcher” of the dictatorship — to Abriata’s killing.
Sandoval’s lawyers had argued that he would not get a fair trial in Argentina, where he would face torture or poor detention conditions.
– Legal tussle –
But their appeals to the European Court of Human Rights to take up his case failed.
Argentina’s foreign ministry said the extradition “consolidates the principle that crimes against humanity should not go unpunished and that those who are accused of such serious crimes must appear before the courts to be tried.”
Abriata was detained at the notorious ESMA navy training school in Buenos Aires, where an estimated 5,000 people were held and tortured after the military coup of 1976 — many of them thrown from planes into the sea or the River Plate.
Sophie Thonon, a lawyer acting for Argentina, told AFP that Abriata’s 92-year-old mother Beatriz Cantarini de Abriata had been “desperately waiting” for Sandoval to “explain himself before Argentine justice”.
AFP/File / DANIEL GARCIAAbriata’s 92-year-old mother Beatriz Cantarini de Abriata, shown here at a protest in 2014, is “desperately waiting” for his trial, a lawyer for Argentina told AFPSandoval, who has dismissed the accusations as fabrications, fled Argentina after the military junta fell.
Despite taking French nationality, Argentina was able to extradite him as the alleged crime took place beforehand.
Sandoval was a professor at the Sorbonne’s Institute of Latin American Studies in Paris and the University of Marne-la-Vallee outside the French capital.
The French Council of State, which advises the government on legal matters, approved his extradition in August 2018, prompting Sandoval to appeal.
The Constitutional Council determined that no statute of limitations could be applied to an “ongoing” case, citing the fact that Abriata’s body has never been found.
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– ‘Terrible anniversary’ –
“It’s been eight very long years since the extradition process began in 2012,” Carlos Loza, who was held in a cell with Abriata, told AFP after Sandoval’s arrival in Argentina.
“Today is the terrible anniversary of our ‘disappearance’ on December 16, 1976,” said Loza, then aged 23 and held in a cell with four others after their arrest at a local Communist Party office in the Buenos Aires district of Barracas.
“We were all released that January. One committed suicide in 2012, because he could not overcome what we had lived through, another died from an illness.”
Loza does not know if Sandoval was involved in his own case, he says.
Loza and another surviving prisoner are fulfilling what he said was a commitment they made in prison “to testify for justice” against the perpetrators of the dictatorship’s “dirty war.”
“When we got out, it took us a month to find the courage to go to Hernan’s house,” Loza said.
“We thought he had been released too, but when we got there his sister told us that he never came back.”
Abriata had been married for a few months by the time he was arrested.
“A few years ago, the inscription ‘I love you, H.A.’ was discovered on the walls” of the cell, said Loza. The cell is now part of a museum to Argentina’s “disappeared.”
Loza said he took his wife, Monica Dittmar, to see it recently. “It was very moving,” he said.
Loza said he hasn’t slept since Sandoval’s arrest last week.
“I feel the same discomfort that I feel every December 16,” he added.
“Fate decreed that the extradition would be the same day as my abduction, the saddest, most regrettable day of my life.”
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