Argentine authorities have arrested three former policemen in connection with what became known as flights of death during military rule.

They are accused of being the crew when French nun Leonie Duquet and rights activist Azucena Villaflor were thrown from a plane in 1977.

Their bodies washed ashore and were buried in an unmarked grave until their remains were identified in 2005.

Hundreds of political prisoners are known to have died this way.

A judge on Tuesday ordered the arrest of former police officers Enrique Jose De Saint Georges, Mario Daniel Arru and Alejandro Domingo D'Agostino.

A lawyer and a former navy officer were also detained in connection with the case.

Sister Leonie Duquet and Azucena Villaflor, one of the founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo rights group, were among a dozen women seized by police in December 1977.

Another French nun, Alice Domon, who also helped the Mothers, was among those kidnapped but her body has never been found.

Prosecutors this month called for a life sentence to be passed on former navy captain Alfredo Astiz, who is accused of having a key role in the abduction of the nuns and several other people.

Mr Astiz, nicknamed the Blond Angel of Death, is said to have helped security forces by infiltrating meetings of the Mothers at a church in Buenos Aires.

He has already been tried in absentia and sentenced to life by a French court for his involvement in the nuns' murder.

Between 10,000 and 30,000 people are believed to have been disappeared during the 1976 to 1983 dictatorship.

Bedoun Tortured To Confess Drug Smuggling

The Criminal Court has set May 8 for hearing in a case involving a captain working at the Directorate General of Drugs Control who allegedly tortured a Bedoun while in custody.
The Public Prosecution accused the officer of beating the Bedoun, with assistance from other police officers, to force him to confess crimes he allegedly committed. The beating resulted in serious injuries to him, as mentioned in a medical report he submitted to the court.
Meanwhile, the Misdemeanor Court of Appeals upheld an earlier verdict by the Court of First Instance and acquitted a woman of beating a female manager at the workplace. The employee had allegedly pushed her manager as a result of conflicts between them. The defense lawyer argued the accusation was unfounded and contradicted report filed in the lawsuit.

 

Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the 11 September 2001 attacks and the world's most wanted man, has been killed

Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the 11 September 2001 attacks and the world's most wanted man, has been killed in a US operation in north-western Pakistan, Barack Obama has announced.

"Justice has been done," the US president said in a statement that America has been waiting a decade to hear.

US special forces launched a helicopter-borne assault on a closely guarded compound in Abbottabad, 30 miles north-east of Islamabad, on Sunday night, Obama and US officials said.

Bin Laden resisted the attackers and was killed along with three other men in a firefight. The operation lasted 40 minutes. The dead included Bin Laden's most trusted courier, who carried his messages to the outside world, and one of Bin Laden's sons, according to reports.

US forces "took custody" of Bin Laden's body, Obama said. The US stressed Islamic practices would be respected.

No Americans were killed.

Pictures on the Pakistani TV station Express 24/7 showed flames rising from what is said to be the site of Bin Laden's last stand: a building surrounded by trees and high walls.

There had been years of speculation that Bin Laden was hiding in the remote tribal areas of Pakistan or across the border in Afghanistan. But the town where he was eventually found lies a short distance from Islamabad, and is the home to the country's main military training institution, the Pakistan Military Academy, at Kakul. It is several hundred miles from Waziristan, where the CIA drone strike campaign has been concentrated.

The fact that Bin Laden was killed in a mainstream urban area of Pakistan will raise questions about how the six-foot-four fugitive, one of the most famous faces in the world, managed to survive in Pakistan for so long.