PARIS, Dec 16 (NNN-AGENCIES) — France will extradite Argentinian Mario Sandoval to Buenos Aires to face trial over the torture and disappearance of a student during the country’s “dirty war”.
The 66-year-old former police officer was arrested on Wednesday at his home near Paris, after French authorities gave the final go-ahead for his extradition, ending an eight-year legal battle.
He will be sent back under escort aboard an Air France flight from Paris to Buenos Aires, the sources said.
Sandoval has been living in France since 1985 and obtained French citizenship with few aware of his full identity.
Argentina suspects that Sandoval took part in more than 500 cases of kidnappings, torture and murder at a time when some 30,000 “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.
Argentinian authorities say investigators have several witness accounts linking Sandoval – known there as the “butcher” of the dictatorship – to Abriata’s killing.
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 Plata river.
Sandoval, who has dismissed the accusations as fabrications, fled Argentina after the military junta fell.
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. — NNN-AGENCIES
