An Argentine court on Wednesday sentenced Mario Sandoval, deputy police inspector in Argentina during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, to 15 years in prison for crimes against humanity for kidnapping a Peronist militant in the 1970s.
«It is resolved to sentence Mario Alfredo Sandoval to 15 years in prison and absolute disqualification for being considered criminally responsible for the crimes of unlawful deprivation of liberty, aggravated by his condition as a public official, and for the imposition of torments to the detriment of a politically persecuted person,» reads the sentence, as reported by the news agency Télam.
During the session, Sandoval emphasized that «he has always» told the truth and that, although he «regrets» and sympathizes «with the pain of the Abritata family», he was «neither the commissioner nor the inspector who went to the house and arrested that person», according to the agency.
Sandoval, an Argentine repressor who was extradited in 2019 from France, is the main accused of the kidnapping and disappearance in 1979 of Hernán Abriata, a student and militant of the Peronist Youth, who was then 25 years old and studying architecture.
Abriata’s relatives filed a complaint against Sandoval a decade ago, which led a federal judge to file a lawsuit in France to extradite the ex-cop. Sandoval had fled to France after the end of the dictatorship when investigations began in the country for human rights violations.
In 2014 and 2017, two French courts ruled in favor of his extradition. Subsequently, on August 31, 2018, then French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe signed a decree to grant Sandoval’s extradition.
Following this, his defense filed an appeal before the Constitutional Council claiming that the crimes he was charged with were time-barred. The Gallic body rejected his arguments and finally granted in December 2019 the extradition to Argentina.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
