DNA 'clears magnate of kidnapping'

THE owner of Argentina's powerful Clarin media group wants kidnapping charges dropped after DNA tests failed to link her adopted children to those stolen during the country's 1976-1983 "dirty war," her newspaper has reported.

The request, filed on Friday, comes after DNA samples submitted by the two adult children of Ernestina Herrera de Noble showed no matches with a DNA data bank of relatives of those who disappeared during the dictatorship.

Some 30,000 people vanished during the military's war on leftist activists.

The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which represents female relatives of dictatorship-era victims, alleges that some 500 babies were stolen from those who disappeared - and then were adopted by pro-junta families.

Of those, only 107 have been identified.

The kidnapping case against Herrera de Noble was originally filed in 2001, and, after years of legal manoeuvering, a court ordered Marcela and Felipe Noble Herrera to submit to the DNA testing.

"There is no more cross-checking to do," attorney Gabriel Cavallo told the daily Clarin.

The case should be closed because "the experts have already determined that neither Felipe nor Marcela are the children of people who disappeared during the dictatorship," Mr Cavallo said.

But the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo were not ready to admit defeat.

The group has long suspected the Noble Herrera children, both born in 1976, were kidnapped. It says the data bank is being still being updated because many people did not know that their daughters or daughters-in-law were pregnant at the time they vanished.

Continued here:
DNA 'clears magnate of kidnapping'