Italy: War criminal released
01 September 2000
Jorge Antonio Olivera, a former major in the Argentine army, was released on 18 September from preventative custody in Regina Coeli prison in Rome by the Court of Appeal (Fourth section) on the basis of a fake document submitted to magistrates by his lawyers. Olivera was arrested on 8 August in Rome's Leonardo da Vinci airport, when Italian police acted on an international arrest warrant issued by a French judge, Roger Le Loire, in July. He was charged with the kidnapping of Maria Ana Erize Tisseau in October 1976, and her torture in San Juan prison camp where he served in the 1970's. Following Olivera's release, Italian justice minister Piero Fassino ordered an investigation and was told by the Italian consulate in Argentina that the document was "entirely falsified". "It is a very serious case, and it must be immediately ascertained how it could have been possible to release a man accused of horrible crimes on the basis of a document which is clearly and blatantly false", he commented.
Olivera left the army in 1993 and opened a legal practice. He defended former junta leader general Suarez Mason from accusations of kidnapping the new-born children of "disappeared" parents, and reportedly offered to defend Erich Priebke, when the German war criminal was arrested in Argentina. Olivera became the first person arrested abroad for crimes committed during the dictatorship. On 1 September, the Italian justice ministry passed on a French extradition request to the prosecutor's office in the Rome Court of Appeal to start extradition proceedings. Olivera's lawyers, Marco Antonio Bezichieri and Augusto Sinagra, submitted the false document, supposedly a death certificate proving the victim died in 1976, which resulted in the application of the statute of limitation (15 years is the limit for kidnapping charges), the denial of the French extradition request and Olivera's release.
After his custody order was lifted, Olivera flew from Milan to Buenos Aires, where amnesty legislation introduced under Raul Alfonsin in 1987 will ensure his impunity. The general prosecutor of Rome's Court of Appeal was too late when it challenged the decision before the Corte di Cassazione (highest appeal court) on 20 September. He claimed that Maria Luisa Carnevalle, Serenella Siriaco and Massimo Michelozzi, the magistrates who released Olivera, gave "decisive probatory value to documentation which was totally informal, submitted by the defence, affirming the kidnapped woman had died". The document turned out not to be a death certificate, as no such document exists because Maria Ana Erize Tisseau's body was never found. It was merely a request for a death certificate at Buenos Aires' records office, suitably doctored, with the inclusion of a date of death, stamps, and forged signatures of the Argentinian Foreign and Interior Affairs ministers to legitimate the document. Il Manifesto reports that three requests for the woman's death certificate were presented in September, none of which had been fulfilled.
Marianna Li Calzi, the State Under-Secretary for Justice, told Parliament on 6 October that disciplinary proceedings were being taken against the magistrates for failing take the necessary precautions "in the acquisition and translation of a document which arrived from abroad, via fax,"; accepting the defence's description of the document as a "death certificate" without further checks, although even the translation - which was unofficial - stated that it was a request for a certificate; and of basing their decision over whether to maintain preventative measures on a pretext (the woman's death) which was "non-existent".
Luigi Saraceni, a Green MP, wondered how "a measure of this importance, which has international repercussions with the governments of other countries (in this case France and Argentina) was adopted without carrying out any controls regarding the authenticity of a document which was subsequently seen to be ict