ALMUDENA CALLATRAVA
Associated Press
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — A judge is seeking to question the man revealed this week to be the long-lost grandson of a human rights activist whose daughter was captured and killed during Argentina’s “dirty war,” an official said Thursday.
Judge Maria Servini de Cubria has sent an order directing Ignacio Hurban to give testimony next week about his apparently illegal adoption following his mother’s execution in August 1978, said the judicial official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the information was not publicly announced.
Servini de Cubria, who has investigated cases of children seized by the military during the dictatorship, wants to know what, if anything, Hurban, a 36-year-old music teacher from the provincial city of Olavarria, knows about how he came to be raised by the people he thought were his parents, the official said.
Estela Barnes de Carlotto, founder of the human rights group Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, refers to him as “Guido.” That is the name she says her daughter intended for her son according to a fellow prisoner in one of the clandestine detention centers run by the military during its repression of dissidents during the 1976-83 dictatorship.
De Carlotto has become the most prominent human rights activist in Argentina while pressing for the search for her grandson and hundreds of other children believed to have been taken under similar circumstances. She stunned the country with her announcement Tuesday that she had located her grandson, the child of her daughter Laura, a student activist.
The 83-year-old woman met with her grandson for the first time on Wednesday but has said little about the meeting, saying she wants to protect the man’s privacy and not overwhelm him.
A lawyer for the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo sent a letter to the judge asking that he not be compelled to give testimony so soon after he was identified.
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