A court in Argentina has sentenced to 15 years in prison former policeman Mario Sandoval, who forty years ago, during the military dictatorship, served in one of the most notorious torture centers in the country, reports BBC.

Sandoval, 69, was found guilty of kidnapping and torturing leftist student Hernan Abriata, who disappeared in 1976 and is presumed dead.

After the fall of the junta, Sandoval fled the country and settled in France, where he began lecturing at the university, but France extradited him to Argentina in 2019.

The former policeman was accused of involvement in the kidnapping and torture of hundreds of leftist activists between 1976 and 1983, when the country was ruled by the military. But only one case was heard in court - that of Hernan Abriata, an architecture student who was dragged from his home by police in 1976 and thrown into Argentina's largest secret prison, which was set up at the Argentine Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA). Nothing is known of his subsequent fate.

It is believed that more than 5,000 Argentinians who opposed the military junta passed through this prison. Only about a hundred survived.

The prisoners were interrogated and tortured. In the end, many of them were drugged and thrown out of airplanes into the ocean.

According to survivors of the horrors of incarceration at ESMA prison, Mario Sandoval was one of the worst executioners. They say he liked to tie prisoners to metal bed frames and torture them with a cattle prod.

Two years after the military in Argentina was removed from power, Sandoval moved to France. There he took a job as a defense and security consultant, obtained French citizenship, and even taught for six years as a guest lecturer at the Sorbonne's Latin American Institute.

It was not until 2008 that Sandoval was identified as a former police officer suspected of kidnapping and torturing hundreds of Argentine activists. After a lengthy trial, the French Supreme Administrative Court ruled that he could be extradited to his homeland because the crimes he was accused of had been committed before he was granted French citizenship.