Whistle-Blower Says Face Slashed

A former navy captain whose horrific revelations forced Argentina’s military to make unprecedented apologies for its 1976-83 “dirty war” crimes said he was slashed in the face by attackers telling him to keep quiet. Adolfo Scilingo said that four men with police IDs on a central Buenos Aires street ordered him into a car Thursday night and carved into his face the initials of three journalists he had spoken to. “They told me we had to lay off the subject of ‘the disappeared’ or, if not, they were going to rub out the four of us,” he said. Local newspapers published photographs of the mustachioed Scilingo with the letter “M” slashed into his forehead, and “G” and “V” cut into his cheeks. In 1995, Scilingo became the first military officer to describe how he had participated in the notorious “death flights” in which hundreds of suspected leftists were disposed of by being dumped over the Atlantic in the 1970s.