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SANTIAGO, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Chile's Supreme Court on Wednesday condemned 33 former agents for the kidnapping and torture of five Communist Party militants in 1987, during the regime of General Augusto Pinochet.
A group of agents arrested in Santiago Julian Pena Maltes, Alejandro Pinochet Arenas, Manuel Sepulveda Sanchez, Gonzalo Fuenzalida Navarrete and Julio Munoz Otarola, five young militants of the Communist Party and of the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front.
The activists were tortured and their whereabouts have been unknown ever since.
An investigation determined that those young men were assassinated and their bodies were thrown into the Pacific Ocean.
The Supreme Court condemned Alvaro Corbalan Castilla and Hugo Salas Wenzel, directors of Pinochet's secret police, the CNI, to 15 years in jail, respectively.
Twenty-one other agents were sentenced to 10 years in jail, while another nine were sentenced to five years and one to three years.
Furthermore, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of compensation demands against the State of Chile and ruled that 380 million pesos (574,000 U.S. dollars) would be paid to the families of the victims.
According to the court's statement, the bodies of the five men were removed from their detention center and flown out to the Pacific in an army helicopter before being thrown into the ocean, weighed down with railway track parts.
Chile's Rettig Report, which looked into the crimes of the Pinochet dictatorship, said a total of 3,119 people were assassinated by the regime.
