Kidnapped young man, cut little finger and $30,000 ransom: 20 years after the fall of the “Patovic gang”
Members of the gang that kidnapped Ariel Strajman and cut off the little finger on his right hand were so violent, bloodthirsty and ferocious that researchers even compared them to the Puccio clan, as several of them agreed to be members the same family with an extraordinary degree of perversity. On the night of October 16, 2002, a young man was entering the garage of the building where he lived in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Villa Urquiza when he was approached by two subjects who, in addition to pointing guns at his head, began punching him. him in the stomach and kidneys. to break it They immediately put him in a car and drove him to a nearby house on Holmberg Street, which later proved to be from The Sommaruga familywhere most of the band members were from.
The original goal of the criminals was to loot his apartment, but when they noticed the movements of people in circulation, they were afraid that they might inform the police and decided to take him. On the way, one blindfolded him while the other drove. When they reached the house, they stopped the car, waited for a few minutes and when everything was ready, they entered the house. They kicked and pushed him down the stairs, sliding down each step into the basement, where they bound him so tightly he could barely breathe. Because of this particular action and some others that were later added, such as contempt, abandonment, and torture, comparisons to the Puccios arose.
In the court case – presided over by the late federal judge Claudio Bonadio – and during Strajman’s oral trial He spared no words to tell of the suffering that he suffered while his captors laughed in his face. They wanted him to drink alcohol to make him drunk and present no defense, but because he didn’t want to, he unleashed the wrath of his captors, who forced him to swallow Lexotanil pills until he lost consciousness.
Meanwhile, they threatened him with shouts: “What you will suffer here has nothing to do with what happened to them in the holocaust, you will see a fucked up Jew.”they repeated as they threw slices of ham in his face and put their fingers in his mouth to force him to eat.
And they didn’t stop: the worst was coming. After burning his mouth with a lighter flame and his chest with cigarette embers, they held his right arm tightly, forced him to place his hand on the floor and struck him several times with a hammer. Until someone uttered the fateful cry, “Release your hand on mother’s c…!” And he cut off his little finger with a pair of pliers. During an oral trial twenty years ago, Ariel broke down and had trouble following the story. He relived the acute pain he felt at the time of the amputation. They then bandaged the area with a cloth while they continued to laugh and scare him with more screams, “It’s okay, if your old ones don’t catch up, we’ll keep cutting you into little pieces and you can end up weighing at the bottom of the Riachuel, you morons!”
In addition to behaving similarly to the Puccios, they were known as “The Patovicas Gang” as some of them provided “security” of records. From the second house, they moved him to the La Josefina complex on the corner of Tulipanes and Las Glicinas in the city of Pilar, where they kept him under lock and key and managed to collect the first ransom. something like a thousand dollars, six hundred pesos and jewelry. And since it went well, they tried to ask for more money.
So they put their finger in the box and sent to the apartment Mario, their father, whom they knew to be a jeweler, who had stolen in 2001 through the escruche modality – theft in the absence of its owners. The package inside contained a message that said: “I’ll play for a long time or you won’t see him again.” “It’s serious, it’s not a joke. They wanted something like $30k extra. Mario was startled when he saw the bloodied little finger.
Meanwhile, once the report was filed, investigators intensified their search because they were already on their radar for committing crimes around Saavedra and Villa Urquiza. But the sense of impunity with which they moved led them to make mistakes, some mistakes, how to use the same phone to call for a ransom, so a mobile phone number was quickly identified through which details of the owner of the line were obtained.
In this simple way, the police arrived at the house in Holmberg Street where they originally held Strajman. María Esther Gottig, wife of Alberto Juan Sommaruga, the owners of the house, answered and recognized that the phone belonged to her. But he messed it up even more when he tried to clarify and mentioned that his son used it to “work”. She ended up being detained along with her husband and children Adrian and Pablo and the rest of the suspects, one of whom was named Diego Sibio – Gottig’s only son – and others who were not part of the family. They were arrested in operations that were carried out simultaneously.
Three days after the kidnapping, tasked with the Complex Crimes Unit of the Federal Police, headed by then-Commissioner Inspector Carlos Sablich, it was discovered that the rest of the kidnappers were residents of Villa Urquiza, who were known to Sommaruga, and they ordered cautious raids. One was the key to reaching Pilar’s home and be able to relax to Ariel Strajman. In others, they were able to take two nine-millimeter pistols, another 11.25, a .357 Magnum revolver, a .32 with forged numbers, and machine gun Israeli mini automatic Uzi.
All the detainees were accused of crimes from the beginning “kidnapping for extortion, illegal association, torture with the aggravating factor of racial hatred, very serious injuries, use of forged identity document and illegal possession of weapons of war.” The woman, María Esther Gottig, was housed in Ezeiza Women’s Prison and the men in Villa Devoto Prison. Two years later, in the last week of September 2004, the Federal Oral Court No. 1, composed at the time of Mario Gustavo Costa, Martín Federico and Jorge Gettas, handed down the sentence: 22 years in prison for Adrián Sommaruga; 16 for his brother Pablo; 14 for Osvaldo Kero; six for Maria Esther Gottig; five for Alberto Sommaruga and Diego Sibio; and three for Nicolás Barlar.
Ariel Strajman, always accompanied by his lawyer Carlos Wiater, listened to the judgments in the Comodoro Py Courts with a mixture of anger and resignation. On entry and much more on exit clearly demanded the death penalty for his captors: “By this failure they have destroyed me again, before it was my body, now my mind. It is a huge injustice. But the last straw came when one of them had in his last words the courage to show solidarity with his familycomplete lack of respect. They laughed in my face again. Therefore, I left the room in utter helplessness. I felt that justice allowed them to do what they wanted again, I’m outraged, I can’t take it anymore,” he fumed.
Over the years, in April 2020 to be precise, Pablo Sommaruga, who had already served time for the kidnapping of Strajman, experienced an act of aggression while enjoying a temporary release from Unit 14 Esquel in a weapons holster. It happened around the Vepam neighborhood when neighbors They cursed him and beat him.
He was accompanying his pregnant wife to the doctor – with prior permission for “decency” when several people recognized him and insulted him. But he only responded by saying in an interview he had with the media in the city of Chubut at the time, Notes on NEK: “I have already paid for the guilt of the past, I don’t know why they are cruel to me, I don’t have a case of child rape, nor the profile of a murderer.” When Ariel Strajman saw it and heard it in a video circulating in the media, he was eloquent: “Too bad I wasn’t there.”.