The federal judge of the Argentine city of Campana, Adrián González Charvay, sent three defendants to trial for the murder of five members of the Peronist guerrilla association Montoneros in 1975, an act known as the Luján River Massacre and it was declared imprescriptible for dealing with crimes against humanity.
The defendants are two former police officers detained with preventive detention under house arrest, Hermes Vicente Acuña and Carlos Urbano Leguizamón and a third, Samuel Bunge Diamante, accused of alleged cover-up. All will be judged by the Federal Oral Court of San Martín 3.
González Charvay closed the investigation and sent the case to trial for what happened on April 12, 1975 when, according to the case, Buenos Aires police officers murdered Carlos Lagrutta, Carlos Benuzzi, Carlos Tuda, Luis Bocco and Guillermo Rodríguez.
The events occurred after the theft of a Mercedes Benz truck by the Montón militants, after which they were intercepted by police officers who were carrying out controls on vehicles at the height of the Buenos Aires town of Zárate. They were members of the General Sarmiento and Escobar police stations, who According to the accusation, the victims were murdered in a vacant lot., when they were defenseless and had already surrendered.
In addition to those prosecuted, nine other Buenos Aires police officers were involved in the events, eight of whom died and one was declared incompetent.
During the investigation it was determined that there was a “coordination” to hide the facts based on the analysis of the autopsies carried out in 1975 by the Forensic Medical Corps and the Directorate of Criminalistics and Forensic Studies of the Gendarmerie.
In addition, the court ordered the exhumation of the skeletal remains of three of the victims: Bocco, Rodríguez and Molinas Benuzzi, for an expert report carried out by the Forensic Medical Corps and the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF).
The two detainees will be tried for “doubly aggravated homicide with treachery and with the premeditated concurrence of two or more people in five acts.” The third defendant, processed without preventive detention, former chief officer of the Campana police station at the time of the events, will be tried “for failing to communicate to the authority the news he had about the commission of a crime when he was obliged to do so by his profession or employment.
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