Pinochet ‘death flight’ helicopter in UK park

Ana Becerra Arce stands in a clearing at the site of a former detention and death camp in central Chile where she was held prisoner in 1975. “This was where the helicopters took off,” she says, pointing to the outlines of a now-overgrown landing pad. The remote spot was ideal for Augusto Pinochet’s secret police to board prisoners on to their fleet of Puma helicopters before flying out over the ocean, and casting them – still alive – into the water.

Such “death flights” were part of a campaign to forcibly disappear political dissidents carried out by military dictatorships in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile in the 1970s and 1980s. Officers would often drug or beat victims before throwing them from aircraft.

But attempts to bring a prosecution for Chile’s first such flight have stalled as investigators have not had access to a key piece of evidence: the helicopter involved, which was sold by the Chilean military in 2003 and shipped to the UK. Today, its rusting fuselage sits in the pine forests of Horsham, Sussex, where, in a gruesome twist, it now serves as a prop in a park used for airsoft – a team-based shooting game.

Families of the disappeared expressed revulsion on hearing how the aircraft in which their relatives lived their last moments was now being used, and called for it be returned to Chile as a monument to Pinochet’s victims.

“That helicopter is stained with blood,” said Gaby Rivera, president of the Association of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared. “Of course it should not be in an amusement park.”

Chile’s first known death flight took place in October 1973, a month into Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship. Three of Becerra Arce’s political comrades – Luis Fernando Norambuena Fernandois, Gustavo Manuel Farías Vargas and Ceferino del Carmen Santis Quijada – were forced on to a Puma with the registration H-255, bound to a metal railing, and then, 20 minutes later, thrown into the Pacific Ocean.

In 2001, the Chilean army admitted to killing more than 100 people using the same method during Pinochet’s rule. But efforts to identify victims and perpetrators have been hampered by a lack of co-operation. It was only in 2018 that a former brigadier and three pilots were officially named as suspects for the forced disappearance of the three men.

But the case remains open as investigators never had access to a key piece of evidence: H-255. Stripped of its electronics and blades, the helicopter’s empty hulk is the centrepiece of a game called “heli domination” at the Dogtag Airsoft park, where participants use low-power airguns to simulate combat.

“There’s a massive heli in the middle. Whoever can touch [it for] the most amount of time will be the winner,” says a staff member in a video filmed earlier this year.

Rivera said that Chile’s army should have made the helicopter available to investigators, and called on officials to finally supply the names of all those who were thrown into the sea.

Sebastián Velásquez, who represents the families of Norambuena and Farías Vargas, said that a vital piece of evidence such as H-255 should never have left Chile.

Velásquez, a lawyer at the memory and justice organisation Londres 38, said that H-255 was hastily sold around the time of the first state-led investigations into the dictatorship’s crimes, which, he said, “is cause for suspicion”. He called on the Chilean government to bring the helicopter home to “serve as a memorial of the horror”.

The UK-based publication Helicopter International reported that H-255 was purchased by the British company Askari Aeroparts around 2003. It “made a couple of appearances in 2005 at local air shows” but was subsequently broken up for spare parts.

Dogtag Airsoft’s owner, Ross Beare, said he was unaware of the Puma’s dark past until he was contacted by the Guardian.

“I took delivery of the dismantled aircraft in November 2014. It was just the empty fuselage and tail shell,” he said.

Beare said he “simply knew it was in the Chilean air force” and that the helicopter was “looking rather sorry for itself” after being in the woodland for almost a decade.

“I’m not sure I shall be able to look at it in the same way again or how I will feel when my young son wants to sit in it given now I know its history,” he said in an email.

Chile has been slow to recognise the brutality of the Pinochet era, unlike neighbouring Argentina, which has taken decisive steps to condemn those responsible for crimes against humanity. In June, a former Argentine “death flight” plane was returned from the US to Argentina to be displayed in the Buenos Aires Museum of Memory. The plane, Skyvan PA-51, was found in the US with its flight log intact, a vital piece of evidence that led to the conviction of three pilots.

Prosecuting those guilty of the atrocities committed on H-255 appears increasingly distant. The helicopter is reduced to a weathered shell, and the flight log has never been located.