'We don't want executions. The noose is too good for them'

Carlos Lordkipanidse was strapped down and electric wires were attached to him in the interrogation room of the Naval Mechanics School (ESMA) in Buenos Aires. His 20-day-old son was placed on his chest. When his torturers sent the voltage through his body, his son suffered the shocks too. The man torturing him threatened to smash the baby against the wall if he did not cooperate.

Mr Lordkipanidse was one of the lucky ones. He lived to tell the tale when many of his friends disappeared, their bodies never found. He is a taxi driver now, living in a block of flats in the San Cristobal district of Buenos Aires.

Last month the man he identified as his torturer, who had just been ordered arrested for extradition to Spain, went into a bar in the port area, had a drink, went outside and sat down opposite a statue of the Virgin Mary. He put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. He survived but blew away half his face and is now in custody in the naval hospital.

Mr Lordkipanidse was 26 in 1978 and a member of the Peronist Youth when he was taken to ESMA. He was aware of the risks he had been running and knew that the authorities had been looking for him for more than two years.

"We knew it was dangerous," he said in his small sitting room, surrounded by photos of his children and a display of his fly-fishing equipment on the wall.

Like a number of others, he was kept in the camp for 30 months and was tortured again when they discovered that he had owned a car and wanted to know where it was.

Why did they not kill him? "You have to ask them that," he said.

Finally he and his wife and son were released. After returning home he discovered that the army was after him and decided to leave the country. He went first to Brazil and then to Sweden, where his wife and three children still live.

"I took a very difficult decision to come back to Argentina and continue the struggle which was started before they were born," he said.

He now works with others tracking down former torturers and exposing them. His son, he said, now an aeronautics engineer in Sweden, had no memory of the torture and he had not talked to him about it.

He said his son had just sent him emails encouraging him in his work.

He has been subjected to recent death threats, because he may be a witness if there are trials. Someone spray-painted the word rata (rat) outside his flat after he first made his accusations public.

"We don't want executions. The noose is too good for them, I would rather they lived out their life like Rudolph Hess, in jail," he said.

"The difference between now and then is that they will have a trial and a judge and a prosecution.

"We had none of those things. Before, if you killed me, you were a murderer but if a military officer killed me, he was not a murderer."

Asked how he would describe that period, he picked up a folder of photographs showing helmeted soldiers forcing hooded captives to their knees.

On closer inspection, it became clear that the photos were recent.

"These are members of the American and British military in Iraq," he said.

Other pictures showed hooded prisoners at the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

"This is what it was like."