Chilean judge charges former army officers with kidnapping of US professor
“A judge ordered the arrest on Tuesday of eight retired police and military officers in connection with the kidnapping and disappearance of Boris Weisfeiler, an American university professor who disappeared while hiking in Chile in 1985,” Pascale Bonnefoy reports in the New York Times,
Mr. Weisfeiler, then 43, was the only United States citizen to have disappeared during the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Two other Americans, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, were murdered in the aftermath of the military coup that brought General Pinochet to power in 1973. … The case was reopened in 2000 after the Clinton administration declassified about 450 secret documents on the disappearance. The American documents, which were cited in the Chilean indictment on Tuesday, indicated that Mr. Weisfeiler may have been handed over to a secretive German religious cult known as Colonia Dignidad a few miles from where he was last seen. A military informer told American Embassy officials that Mr. Weisfeiler, a Russian-born Jew who taught math at Penn State, was tortured and executed.
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