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Dutch pilot held over Argentine "death flights"
Wed Sep 23, 2009 11:24am EDT
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By Ben Berkowitz and Judy MacInnes
AMSTERDAM/MADRID (Reuters) - Spanish authorities arrested a Dutch-Argentine airline pilot on charges that decades ago he flew planes used to throw opponents of Argentina's former military junta into the sea, Spain said on Wednesday.
Julio Alberto Poch was arrested after an Argentine judge traveled to Europe and Bali to interview colleagues of his who said the pilot boasted about participating in the so-called death flights, Argentina's Human Rights Secretariat said in a statement.
Poch, 57, a retired lieutenant from the Argentine navy, was arrested on Tuesday at Valencia's Manises airport during a stopover on the way back to Amsterdam.
Argentina had issued an international arrest warrant and requested that Holland extradite Poch, but he was protected by his Dutch citizenship, the secretariat said.
Poch was working for the Dutch airline Transavia, owned by Air France-KLM, the airline said.
An Argentine government report says more than 11,000 people died or disappeared during the so-called "Dirty War," a crackdown on alleged leftists and other opponents of the military regime that ruled from 1976 to 1983.
Many of those abducted were sent to torture centres and then murdered. Some were drugged and then dropped out of airplanes or helicopters during flights over the icy South Atlantic or the Rio de la Plata.
Poch is implicated in four criminal cases related to events between 1976 and 1983 and involving over 1,000 victims, the Spanish government said. The Netherlands said he had been arrested at Argentina's request.
Argentine Federal Judge Sergio Torres, who headed the investigation, was not immediately available for comment.
Torres traveled to the Netherlands in December 2008 to gather testimony from work colleagues of Poch who said he confessed to them his involvement in the "death flights" and the way prisoners were thrown out of planes, Argentina's Human Rights Secretariat said.
"(Poch) told me how aboard his plane, people who were still alive were thrown off with the intent of executing them," a pilot told Torres during an interview with Torres in Holland, official Argentine news agency Telam reported.
Poch justified the killings saying "they were terrorists," according to the testimony cited by Telam.
Another pilot who worked with Poch said "his behavior was outrageous, he defended throwing people off planes into the ocean," Telam said.
Poch worked for Transavia since the 1980s when he fled Argentina to the Netherlands, where he lives with his family, Telam said.
In 2005, Argentina's Supreme Court, at the urging of then-President Nestor Kirchner, struck down two amnesty laws that shielded hundreds of former officers from charges of human rights abuses during the dictatorship. Continued...
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UPDATE 1-Dutch pilot held over Argentine 'death flights'
5:04am EDT
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