Chilean Ex-Officers Charged in 1985 Kidnapping of U.S. Hiker
|
Version 0 of 1. SANTIAGO, Chile — 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. 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. In his indictment, Judge Jorge Zepeda said that three members of a police patrol near Ñuble, on the Argentine border 225 miles south of the capital, arrested Mr. Weisfeiler sometime between Jan. 3 and 5, 1985. After being alerted by a local farmer to a bearded stranger wearing “military-type attire,” the police officers assumed Mr. Weisfeiler was an “extremist” who had crossed the border illegally, the ruling said. The officers covered up the arrest by claiming that the hiker had drowned trying to cross Los Sauces River, and continue to conceal the whereabouts of his body to this day, the indictment said. The three police officers, as well as four members of a military patrol in the area, were charged with kidnapping and concealment, while a fourth police officer was indicted as an accomplice. The indictment did not include murder charges or address the circumstances of Mr. Weisfeiler’s presumed death. 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. The ruling makes no mention of where Mr. Weisfeiler might have been taken after his arrest. “My family and I are pleased that there is finally some concrete progress and that we may finally learn the truth about what happened to my brother,” said Olga Weisfeiler, Mr. Weisfeiler’s sister, a resident of Newton, Mass., who was interviewed by Skype. “We have been waiting for this day for 27 long years. I am also hopeful that those ordered arrested will speak the truth and lift the burden of lies from their shoulders.” |