Project Andrea

Sarin manufactured in Chile was used for the first time by Michael Townley against two Peruvian citizens.[5] Townley revealed to Judge Alejandro Madrid that in Chile not only real estate conservator Renato León Zenteno (1976) and Army corporal and DINA agent Manuel Leyton (1977) were murdered with sarin, but also other people whose deaths were made to appear as suicides or strange deaths.[1] Some of these people, according to Townley, were involved in the storage and transport of containers of sarin in the 1970s and early 1980s. One of them would be a doctor or assistant who participated in the autopsies of Renato Zenteno and Corporal Leyton.[5]

Townley told the judge that the Protocol Director of the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Carlos Guillermo Osorio, had not committed suicide – as was officially announced in October 1977 – but had been killed.[1][5] Osorio was in charge of granting passports with false identities so that Army officers – among them, Armando Fernández Larios – could travel to the United States to prepare the attack against Orlando Letelier and two others (Rolando Mosqueira and René Riveros), to try to mislead American intelligence about the authorship of the attack and cover the backs of the DINA. The sources maintain that Townley affirmed that Osorio was another victim of sarin, even though he had been shot once in the head.[5]

Eugenio Berríos played a role in the death of Carmelo Soria, a CEPAL official who was kidnapped by a DINA operative in July 1976 and taken to Townley's house in Lo Curro.[5] There, in the Berríos laboratory, Soria was administered sarin gas, according to the investigation, and was then tortured until his spine was broken. Later, his body was found in a car in the Canal San Carlos.[6]

This gas was probably used to murder the journalist Eugenio Lira Massi, who in June 1975 was found dead in circumstances not entirely clear, in the room he occupied in Paris, where he worked at the newspaper L'Humanité. In 1990, the journalist Edwin Harrington published in the magazine Nueva Voz that Lira was murdered by the DINA as part of a plan called Operation France after the arrival in the French capital of "Bernardo Conrads Salazar, identity card No. 4.152.556-6, official of the security service of the dictatorship." Harrington, who cited an FBI report as one of his main sources, argued that Lira's death may have been triggered by sarin gas, which Townley carried on his travels in a bottle of Chanel perfume.[4][7]

Another suspicious death was that of Alfred Schaak,[8] a representative of Paul Schäfer in Germany in charge of arms trafficking. In 1985, two couples who fled from Colonia Dignidad publicly denounced Schäfer's pedophilia. It seems that Schaak then wanted to denounce the arms trade. To prevent this, Winfried Schmidtke and Helmut Seelbach, who were received at the airport by Schaak, who was in perfect health, would have traveled from Dignidad to Germany. A few days later, in October, Schaak died suddenly. Dr. Hartmut Hopp went immediately to Germany and brought the body of Schaak to Chile. In the assembly of settlers he said that Schaak had died of fever and that in his will he left his property to the Colony. At the same time they reported – ten months after the fact – the escape of the couples, adding that their complaints in Germany had done them great harm.[8]

The subsequent condemnation of Schäfer does not include sarin gas production in Colonia Dignidad, the Cerro Gallo Massacre, nor the Monte Maravilla forced labor camp that the colony maintained, since Judge Jorge Zepeda Arancibia did not include these charges in the ruling that sentenced him to a minimum term of seven years of imprisonment for infraction of the Law on Arms Control.[8]

Alexei Jaccard, age 25, was arrested in Buenos Aires on 16 May 1977, along with two other communist militants, by agents of the Argentine dictatorship and the DINA.[9] At that time all traces of them were lost. Despite the efforts made by his family to learn his whereabouts, both in Argentina and in Chile, they only turned up false leads. This changed when three agents, who did not lose their memory or declare themselves insane as their former boss Augusto Pinochet had, gave the judiciary unequivocal information about what happened with Jaccard and the two militants, Ricardo Ramírez Herrera and Héctor Velásquez Mardones. The testimonies coincide in that the three detainees, from Buenos Aires, were taken to the La Reina barracks by "Don Jaime" (alias of Captain Germán Barriga, who committed suicide in 2005) and his agents of Dolphin Group, an elite squad that operated inside the Lautaro Brigade.[10] The director of the DINA, Manuel Contreras, always stated in private and in public that Jaccard, Herrera, and Velásquez were arrested by Argentine intelligence, which had made them disappear by throwing their bodies into the Río de la Plata.[11] But the former agents Eduardo Oyarce Riquelme, Héctor Valdebenito Araya, and Guillermo Ferrán Martínez, all prosecuted for the crimes committed in Simón Bolívar, deny that version, and confirm the passage of Jaccard and his companions through that barracks.[11] Former agent Oyarce recalls another relevant piece of information:

They were eliminated with sarin gas, but I can not say who applied it.[9]