Léonie Duquet
In 1990 a French court in Paris tried Argentine Captain Alfredo Astiz, known to have arrested Duquet and believed implicated in the "disappearance" of Domon, for kidnapping the two sisters.
In July 2005 several bodies were found in a mass grave in General Lavalle Cemetery, 400 kilometers south of Buenos Aires.
DNA testing revealed that within the same grave were the remains of the three "disappeared" Argentine women, founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who had also been missing since December 1977.
[1] Since the confirmation of Duquet's murder, France has been seeking extradition of Astiz; in 2005 he was being detained in Argentina after being indicted on charges of kidnapping and torture.
Léonie Duquet and her fellow nun Alice Domon were introduced to Videla because he needed assistance for his son Alejandro, a disabled child whom they taught and looked after in the Casa de la Caridad in Morón.
In December 1977, Duquet was arrested and kidnapped in the parish of San Pablo Ramos Majia by Marine Captain Alfredo Astiz.
This was shortly after Astiz had led a police action at the Holy Cross Church in Buenos Aires against the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, where he had arranged the arrest of Azucena Villaflor and two other of the 13 founders of the group, together with a total of ten associates.
As neither her nor Villaflor's bodies were found, some observers thought the women may have been among victims flown by plane and helicopter and thrown out while still alive over the ocean near Buenos Aires.
Despite losing some of their founders, the Mothers of the Plaza continued marching and within the year hundreds of women and family friends joined them, demanding an accounting from the government.
In 1990, Alfredo Astiz was tried and convicted in absentia of the kidnapping of the two sisters, Duquet and Domon, by a French court in Paris and sentenced to life imprisonment.
[4] During the ESMA trial, Luis María Mendía testified in January 2007 before the Argentine tribunal that a French intelligence agent, Bertrand de Perseval, had participated in the abduction of Duquet and Domon.
French intelligence agents have long been suspected of having trained Argentine counterparts in "counter-insurgency" techniques (including the use of torture in investigations).
Similarly, Mendía said he and others had obeyed Isabel Perón's "anti-subversion decrees" (giving them a formal appearance of legality, although torture was forbidden by the Argentine Constitution).
In 2012, an Argentinian prosecutor filed charges against Julio Alberto Poch (es), a Dutch-Argentinian pilot, for flying the helicopter that carried the bodies of Domon, Duquet and three other women to be dumped into the Atlantic Ocean.
