MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Army's links to kidnapping gangs under investigation.

A Buenos Aires province Supreme Court report warns of possible ties between Argentine soldiers and criminal gangs implicated in murders and kidnappings, in which police involvement is also suspected.

The document exposes the existence of at least 700 outgoing and incoming calls between telephones under investigation in several serious criminal cases and phones installed at army headquarters. The probe was undertaken by an office in the Supreme Court of Buenos Aires province, the nation's most heavily populated district, as well as the epicenter of a wave of kidnappings that has Argentines on edge. Argentine President Nestor Kirchner and Buenos Aires Gov. Felipe Sola met Tuesday to discuss the investigation's findings, the newspaper La Nacion reported Sunday after gaining access to the documents. A top-ranking army officer told the paper that "The telephone numbers that show up on the wiretaps do, in fact, belong to the corps." The report shows that more than 100 telephone lines serving the Buenos Aires building in which the army's chiefs of staff operate appear on thousands of wiretapped calls made from numbers under investigation in different legal cases. The use of army lines has been established in investigations into 17 kidnappings for ransom, much-publicized murder cases, assaults, threats and false arrests, among other crimes. The calls were made from 1997 up until only a few days ago; among the kidnappings, there were several cases that received wide play in the press, such as those of the brother of Juan Roman Riquelme, a former soccer player with Spain's Barcelona squad, and the father of actor Pablo Echarri. Aside from the alleged links between the military and kidnapping gangs, Argentine officials have acknowledged that members of the Buenos Aires provincial police, the country's largest law enforcement body, have been involved in several of the crimes. "It's time we put an end to having men to whom we have given a badge and gun go out and defend the people involved in this sort of thing," Kirchner said a few weeks back. Of the 137 people police arrested in 10 of the most-widely publicized kidnappings over the past two years, only 23 remain in jail or have been formally charged, a report published Sunday by the newspaper Clarin revealed. In addition to giving details about incidents in which the kidnapping victims and their relatives harbor deep suspicions of police complicity, the paper noted that few kingpins had been apprehended and most of those who have been jailed are minor players. As an example, it cited the case of Cristian Riquelme, a player with Sapin's Villarreal team, whose family paid a $160,000 ransom for his release. Sixty-seven people were arrested in the case, but not a single suspect remains in custody. Eduardo Ovalles, an expert in security matters for the New Majority Studies Center, on Sunday told EFE that "the country's security crisis isn't the result of police corruption, but the lack of a state policy on such matters." "I think that both national officials and those of Buenos Aires province should show that they are pursuing a policy aimed at improving the institutional quality of our law enforcement forces," he said. Ovalles, moreover, said, "We can't forget that law enforcement is, first and foremost, the responsibility of the political establishment, and the police act only within a political and legal framework." New Majority figures show that reported crime in Buenos Aires province increased 228 percent between 1991 and 2002, while that in the Argentine capital rose 372 percent. In the urban belt surrounding Buenos Aires, which is home to around 8 million people, a kidnapping was reported every 20 hours during the first six months of the year, officials said.