Dagmar Hagelin

Case background and investigation

Dagmar Ingrid Hagelin was born in Buenos Aires on September 29, 1959, and held Swedish citizenship through her father, Ragnar Hagelin, according to Wikipedia. On the morning of January 27, 1977, at about 8:30, she went to a house in El Palomar, in Buenos Aires Province, to see her friend Norma Susana Burgos. Argentine press accounts, including Infobae and Maracó Digital, report that a Navy task group from the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA) had detained Burgos the previous day and was waiting at the house for another person, a Montoneros activist.

According to those accounts, Hagelin ran when she was confronted and was shot and wounded in the street. The accounts attribute the shot to Navy lieutenant Alfredo Astiz; Infobae reports that Burgos later testified that Astiz himself said he had fired. Sources differ on whether she was hit in the head or the back. Neighbours saw the wounded girl placed in the boot of a car. It is widely reported that she was mistaken for the person the task group was seeking.

Hagelin was taken to the ESMA, which operated as a clandestine detention centre. Burgos, who survived, stated that she saw Hagelin there with a bandaged head wound, and Maracó Digital reports that other detainees placed her in the building until late February or early March 1977, after which there is no trace of her. Her body has never been located.

Ragnar Hagelin reported the abduction to the Swedish embassy, and the Swedish government pressed the Argentine junta for information. Infobae describes strongly worded protests from Stockholm and wide coverage in Sweden. Maracó Digital reports that an Argentine military proceeding in 1980 cleared Astiz and two other officers. Spanish-language Wikipedia states that the case was closed as time-barred in 1986 and reopened by an appeals court in August 2006 as a crime against humanity.

On November 29, 2017, Federal Oral Court No. 5 in Buenos Aires delivered its verdict in the trial known as ESMA III, which examined 789 crimes and 54 defendants. Infobae reported that Astiz and Jorge Acosta were among those given life sentences and that six defendants were acquitted. La Nación noted that the charges against Astiz in that trial included the disappearance of Dagmar Hagelin. Astiz had already received a life sentence in a separate ESMA trial in October 2011, and a French court had sentenced him in absentia in 1990 for the abduction of two French nuns, according to Wikipedia.

Ragnar Hagelin, who spent decades pursuing the case, died in Stockholm in October 2016, the year before the verdict, according to Wikipedia. What happened to his daughter after she was last seen at the ESMA has not been established.