Alfredo Astiz, Captain in the Argentine Navy and convicted killer, was known as the “Blonde Angel of Death” during the reign of Jorge Rafael Videla. In 1990 the Argentine Navy Intelligence officer was convicted in absentia in France of kidnapping and murdering two French nuns, Alice Domon and Leonie Duquet , and a teenage girl during the Argentine Dirty War. Swedish prosecutors have linked this most famous of "dirty warriors" to the death of 17 year old Swedish national Dagmar Hagelin .

Astiz committed some of his crimes at the Naval School of Mechanics (ESMA), the secret Argentine concentration camp used during the Videla dictatorship where as many as 5000 political prisoners were held, tortured and "disappeared" (murdered). The rightist military dictatorship justified the horrific and indiscriminate violence as necessary to end "subversion" from radical leftist groups such as the Montoneros and the ERP.

Astiz was almost extradited to France in 1982 after he surrendered to British troops in the British-Argentine War for the Falkland Islands/Malvinas. Britain handed him back to Argentina.

In 2003 Argentine President Néstor Kirchner reversed the legal immunity for crimes granted to the Argentine dirty warriors in the transition to liberal democratic rule. However, Astiz will face trial in Argentina rather than be extradited to France.

External links

• Arrest
• Facing trial in Argentine to escape French justice

Further reading

• Horacio Verbitsky . 1996. "The Flight: Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior." New York: New Press. ISBN 1565840097.