Low-Cost Airline Pilot Arrested over 'Death Flights' in Argentina

Juan Alberto Poch, a pilot with Air-France-KLM subsidiary Transavia, was on a 40-minute stopover at Valencia's Manises airport and preparing to return to Amsterdam when Spanish police made the arrest. Passengers on the flight for which Poch was due to have been the pilot were not inconvenienced as Transavia had been forewarned about the arrest and another pilot was standing by to fly the plane. The Guardian confirms that Poch, who moved to the Netherlands in the 1980s, regularly flew the route from Amsterdam's Schipol Airport to Valencia. According to the New York Times, a statement issued by Argentina's Human Rights Secretariat indicated that the arrest was as a result of information obtained during interviews with Poch's work colleagues in Europe and Bali. The interviews were conducted by Sergio Torres, an Argentinian Federal Judge. Poch had apparently confessed, even boasted, to his colleagues about his involvement in the "death flights" during which opponents of Argentina's former military junta, which was in power between 1976 and 1983, were thrown from planes or helicopters in to the Atlantic Ocean. It is believed that 1,000 people, who were drugged but still alive when thrown from the aircraft, were killed in that manner. The Argentinian government has said that 11,000 opponents of the junta died or disappeared during what has been called the "dirty war". But the Guardian reports that human rights groups put the number closer to 30,000. Some years ago Adolfo Scilingo, who like Poch served in the Argentinian navy, told of his involvement in the "death flights" and described how prisoners, who believed that they were simply being moved between jails, were drugged prior to boarding the aircraft, drugged again once up in the air, and were then stripped before being thrown out of the aircraft's door in to the ocean below. It is thought the pilots were fully aware of what was happening behind them. When the Argentinian authorities issued an international arrest warrant and asked their Dutch counterparts to extradite Poch, who allegedly referred to those thrown from planes he was flying as terrorists, the Dutch citizenship held by the 57-year-old man prevented the extradition. And now an extradition tribunal must be held in Spain to confirm that Poch is indeed to be returned to Argentina. It was during the time of the junta, in 1982 to be precise, that the ultimately unsuccessful Argentinian invasion of the British-controlled Falkland Islands took place.