The ruling by the Spanish government was the final step to extradite Julio Alberto Poch, a retired Argentine navy lieutenant with Dutch citizenship, to Argentina following an international warrant for his arrest last year.
Poch was arrested in Spain last September after an Argentine judge travelled to Europe and spoke to the pilot’s colleagues who said he had boasted about hurling drugged prisoners into the River Plate or the Atlantic Ocean during Argentina’s so-called Dirty War.
He denied the charges against him but accepted extradition.
More than 11,000 people died or disappeared during the Dirty War, a crackdown on alleged leftists and other opponents of the military regime that ruled from 1976 to 1983, an Argentine government report says.
