Chile: Police in Buenos Aires have arrested a former Nazi accused in Chile of paedophilia and practising torture under the regime of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Once a Nazi corporal and founder of a sinister religious sect in southern Chile called Colonia Dignidad, Paul Schäfer (83) has been Chile's most wanted man for eight years.
He was held on Thursday in a joint operation between Argentine and Chilean police in the small town of Tortuguitas, west of Buenos Aires. He is also wanted in Germany on abuse charges.
Chilean president Ricardo Lagos expressed his satisfaction at the arrest.
Schäfer fled Germany for Chile in 1961 to avoid child sexual abuse charges. He was forced to go on the run again when a warrant for his arrest on multiple counts of paedophilia, including the rape of his own son, was issued in August 1996 by Chilean authorities.
Schäfer was convicted in absentia in November 2004 with 22 other Dignidad members.
In the 1960s dozens of German immigrants moved to Colonia Dignidad, the commune and religious community formed by Schäfer, surrounded by barbed and electrified wire and protected by barricades.
Sect members spoke German and worked every day in the cult's agricultural and restaurant businesses, with no pay. Men and women were separated so strictly that some married couples did not even speak to each other for years. In fact, restrictions on intimacy were so tough that for decades no children were born there.
They saw Schäfer, who preached an unnamed religion dictating harsh discipline as the path to the "supreme being", as a god-like guru and followed him blindly. Although those close to the leader were allowed to come and go, most members of the community lived in isolation from the outside world.
Until 1997 the colony acted under its own jurisdiction with its own security forces, and the Chilean police never entered.
It is widely believed that Dignidad functioned as Chile's first clandestine detention centre under the dictatorship of Gen Augusto Pinochet and was the command centre of Operation Condor, a bloody crackdown on left-wing opponents resulting in the so-called "disappearance" of thousands of people.
Local journalist Isabel Guzman said: "Most people around here who are old enough to remember say that it was Schäfer who taught Pinochet how to torture."
About 300 members of the sect still live at Villa Baviera. Many of them are elderly Germans who do not speak Spanish and continue to have minimal contact with the outside. Some broke a four-decade silence last year and testified that Schäfer systematically abused children in the colony, many of whom were taken from their parents at birth.