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Nazi turned sect leader arrested in Chile

An Argentine police officer escorts one of Chile's most wanted fugitives, Paul Schaefer, to the police department after arresting him in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on Thursday. Schaefer, the leader of a secretive German colony in southern Chile had also been indicted in absentia on charges of sexually abusing 26 children in Colonia Dignidad, the secretive German enclave he founded in the early 1960s in Chile. PHOTO: AP

A former German Nazi soldier turned Chilean sect leader was arrested Thursday on charges of pedophilia and committing torture during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Paul Schaefer, 83, was arrested in the community of Tortuguitas, a town 30km west of Buenos Aires along with six people described as his security team, Argentine police said.

Schaefer was the charismatic leader of a German enclave in southern Chile called Colonia Dignidad. He has been hiding since a warrant for multiple counts of pedophilia was issued in August 1996.

Schaefer was convicted of the charges in November last year along with 22 other Dignidad members.

Argentine Police Commissioner Alejandro Dinisio said police that Schaefer carried no identification documents and refused to speak at the time of his arrest. He added that police had been on his trail for six months.

Argentine television reporters mobbed Schaefer as an agent pushed the elderly suspect on his wheelchair into a provincial police station. Officials said he could be transferred to Buenos Aires as early as yesterday.

Schaefer appeared on television handcuffed and smiling, and holding a bottle of soda.

A former corporal and medic in the Nazi army, Schaefer fled Germany to Chile in 1961 to avoid child sexual abuse charges.

He established the self-subsistent Colonia Dignidad, also called Villa Baviera, in the mountains near the city of Parral, some 350km south of Santiago along with other German immigrants.

Surrounded by barbed and electrified wire and protected by barricades, the community adhered to a strict discipline and remained cut off from the rest of Chilean life.

In 1996 a number of former residents testified that Schaefer systematically abused the colony's children, many of whom were taken from the parents at birth.

Chilean officials also want Schaefer in connection with torture during the 1973-1990 Pinochet dictatorship.

Investigators say that political prisoners, including former leftist leader Alvaro Vallejos Villagran -- arrested by Pinochet agents in May 1974 -- vanished after being sent to Colonia Dignidad.

A former member of Pinochet's secret police gave testimony stating that he knew Vallejos Villagran was taken alive to Dignidad.

Police also want to question Schaefer about the 1985 disappearance of Boris Weisfeiler, an American Jewish mathematics professor of Russian origin.

Investigators believe Weisfeiler was picked up by a military border patrol while he was backpacking in the region on suspicion of being a spy and dropped off at Dignidad.
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