German officials search Argentine ‘dirty war’ suspect’s home

German authorities on Tuesday searched the Berlin home of an Argentinian-German man accused of abduction, torture and murder of opposition members during the rule of Argentina’s military dictatorship.

Officials from the Federal Criminal Police Office and the Berlin prosecutors’ office searched the home of Luis Esteban Kyburg, 75, in the Prenzlauer Berg district of the capital.

He is accused of targeting at least 15 young men and women in 1976 and 1977, when he was second in command of a unit of divers at an Argentine naval base, Berlin prosecutors said in a statement.

An estimated 30,000 people disappeared in the “dirty war” waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship against suspected left-wing political critics in the 1970s and 1980s.

Kyburg’s elite unit of divers, “Agrupacion Buzos Tacticos”, allegedly played a key role in targeting government critics.

After being tortured, prisoners were often drugged and thrown from planes into the sea.

Tuesday’s search aimed to find “documents, files and data-carrying devices, which shed light on the role of the accused in connection with the “enforced disappearance” of opposition members and their alleged killing”, prosecutors said.

Kyburg has been under investigation for several years in Germany and Argentina.

Argentine authorities filed an extradition request for Kyburg in 2015.

But German officials rejected the demand because he is also a German citizen, and therefore cannot be extradited to face trial elsewhere.