Spain Trial Yields Gruesome Details

MADRID —  Spanish judges heard gruesome testimony Thursday about atrocities by the former military regime during Argentina’s “dirty war,” including the theft of babies and the clandestine cremation of detainees’ bodies.

The accounts came in the trial of Adolfo Scilingo, 58, an Argentine former naval officer who served at a school in Buenos Aires that was used as a prison and torture center.

Scilingo stared at the floor and sipped water as the court for a second day heard excerpts from a tape recording made in 1997 in which he described abuses at the school.

Since his trial began last week, Scilingo has insisted that he fabricated the taped testimony. Scilingo, who faces charges of war crimes, genocide, torture and terrorism, is the first person to be tried in Spain for alleged human rights abuses committed in another country.

In Thursday’s excerpts, Scilingo told how newborns were taken from female detainees and adopted by officers at the school.

“For humanitarian reasons, the pregnant women could not be moved. I mean, eliminated. We had to wait until they gave birth,” he is heard saying.

He did not specify how many cases he knew of, saying only “several.”

Doctors who delivered babies signed birth certificates in which the children took on the names of the people adopting them, he said.

The goal of these illegal adoptions “was to keep the children from falling into the subversive mentality of their parents,” Scilingo is heard saying.

Scilingo, who was the chief electrician at the school, also speaks of how officials there cremated the bodies of people who had died of their injuries while under interrogation.

He said these cremations were referred to as asados -- which translates as “roastings” -- and he was once asked to supply diesel fuel or oil for them to be carried out.

“There were instructions from superiors for all of us at the school to take part. I did not go. It seemed very gruesome to me,” Scilingo says in the tape.

Spanish authorities recorded the testimony during an interrogation with National Court Judge Baltasar Garzon when Scilingo first came to Spain voluntarily in 1997 to testify about what he had seen at the school, which was one of the Argentine regime’s most notorious torture centers.

Garzon ended up jailing Scilingo and indicting him.