Mario Sandoval: Notorious Argentine torturer jailed

A court in Argentina has sentenced a former policeman who worked at one of the most notorious torture centres during the country's military rule to 15 years in prison.

Mario Sandoval, 69, was found guilty of abducting and torturing left-wing student Hernán Abriata, who disappeared in 1976 and is presumed dead.

Sandoval fled Argentina after the end of military rule and settled in France, where he became a university lecturer.

He was extradited in 2019.

Sandoval has been accused of participating in the disappearance and torture of hundreds of left-wing activists during Argentina's military rule from 1976 to 1983.

But the trial only dealt with one case: that of architecture student Hernán Abriata who was dragged from his home by police in 1976.

The left-wing activist was taken to the Navy Higher School of Mechanics, known as Esma for its initials in Spanish.

Esma was Argentina's biggest clandestine detention centre.

It is estimated that more than 5,000 men and women who opposed the military junta where taken there. Only about 100 survived.

Detainees were interrogated and tortured, many of them were later drugged and thrown from planes into the sea.

Survivors say Mario Sandoval was one of the most notorious torturers to have worked at Esma.

They accuse him of tying prisoners to metal bedframes and torturing them with a cattle prod.

Sandoval moved to France two years after Argentina's military junta fell.

There, he became a consultant on defence and security, became a French citizen, and went on to teach for six years as an external lecturer the Institute of Latin American Studies of the Sorbonne, one of France's top universities.

It was not until 2008 that Sandoval the lecturer was identified as the former policeman suspected of having abducted and tortured hundreds of left-wing activists.

After a long legal battle, France's top administrative court ruled that he could be extradited to his home country because the crime he stood accused of had been committed in Argentina when he did not yet hold French citizenship.

His trial in Buenos Aires started in September.

Sandoval maintained to the end that he was not the man who had seized Hernán Abriata in 1976 and showed little emotion when he was convicted.

It is still not known what exactly happened to Abriata after he was held captive. He is one of the approximately 30,000 people who were forcibly disappeared under Argentina's military rule.

Six years ago, his initials and a message from him to his wife Mónica Dittmar were found scrawled on the walls of a cell at Esma, which is now a museum and memorial. It reads: "Mónica te amo" (Mónica, I love you).