Three convicted in Argentine "dirty war" baby case

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - An Argentine couple and a former army officer were convicted on Friday of charges related to the illegal adoption of a political prisoner’s baby during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship.

In a landmark ruling, the federal criminal court sentenced Osvaldo Rivas to eight years in prison, his wife Maria Cristina Gomez to seven years and retired army Capt. Enrique Berthier to 10 years.

The three were charged with kidnapping and hiding Maria Eugenia Sampallo, and falsifying her birth certificate. Berthier was accused of providing the baby, who was born to a woman held in a political prison, to the couple.

It was not immediately clear on which charges each of the three was convicted.

Sampallo is the first of Argentina’s “children of the disappeared” to take legal action against her adoptive parents. Civil plaintiffs can bring charges in criminal court under the Argentine system.

DNA tests in 2001 proved that Sampallo was not the child of Rivas and Gomez, but of a couple arrested during the dictatorship and presumed killed. Sampallo’s mother was abducted in 1977 when she was six months pregnant.

Human rights groups estimate 400 newborns were seized in clandestine torture centres during Argentina’s so-called dirty war and adopted by military families or their friends.

Groups such as the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo have helped nearly 90 of those people discover their true identities.

An independent commission said 11,000 people were killed during the dictatorship when the government cracked down on leftists and dissidents. Human rights groups put the number at up to 3,000 people.

Under President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and her predecessor and husband, former President Nestor Kirchner, courts have scrapped amnesty laws for dictatorship-era crimes and reopened investigations and cases.

Reporting by Damian Wroclavsky; Translating by Fiona Ortiz; Editing by Xavier Briand

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