Adolfo Scilingo

Adolfo Scilingo (born 28 July 1946 in Bahía Blanca) is a former Argentine naval officer who is serving 30 years (the legally applied limit, although he was sentenced to 640 years) in a Spanish prison after being convicted on April 19, 2005 for crimes against humanity, including extra-judicial execution.

Scilingo was charged under Spain's universal jurisdiction laws by investigating magistrate Baltazar Garzón with genocide, 30 counts of murder, 93 of causing injury, 255 of terrorism and 286 of torture. He denied the charges but initially refused to plead, claiming to be unwell. In 2005 doctors ruled Scilingo was fit to stand trial.

The murder charges related to 30 drugged political prisoners thrown out of government jets during Leopoldo Galtieri's military junta's Dirty War against leftist insurgents between 1976 and 1983. Scilingo had earlier attracted great notoriety for publicly confessing to journalist Horacio Verbitsky in c. 1996, to participating in the so-called death flights, the first of a series of public confessions collectively called in Argentina the 'Scilingo effect' (Feitlowitz 1999). Scilingo was serving a jail term for fraud in Argentina at the time.

The court found Scilingo guilty of crimes against humanity and torture and sentenced him to 640 years in jail. 21 years for each for the murder of 30 victims, who were thrown from planes to their deaths, and a further five years for torture and five years illegal detention. Scilingo is unlikely to serve more than 30 years in jail as that is the maximum time a person can serve for non-terrorist offences.

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