2 Officers Held in Slaying of Argentine Journalist

Investigators here have arrested two police officers in the mafia-style slaying of a magazine photographer, making an apparent breakthrough in the politically explosive case, authorities said Thursday.

The arrests of the Buenos Aires provincial police officers and four other suspects came more than 10 weeks after the slaying of Jose Luis Cabezas, a photographer for the magazine Noticias. A gang abducted Cabezas on Jan. 25 as he left a party in a beach resort. He was bound, shot in the head and set on fire in his car.

The case grew quickly into a test in the battle against impunity and organized crime in Argentina, spurring nonstop media coverage, protests and complaints by international human rights groups and media organizations.

It was the first slaying of a journalist since the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, when journalists were routinely persecuted.

And the photographer’s slaying exacerbated the crisis in a 48,000-officer police force that has been described by critics as a rogue army. Commanders of the unit have been charged in connection with several notorious crimes, including the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. That attack, believed to have been carried out by Mideast terrorists, left 96 dead.

“We are advancing on very firm clues,” said Gov. Eduardo Duhalde of Buenos Aires province, who has staked his presidential aspirations on a vow to solve the killing and clean up the police department. But he cautioned that the investigation is not over.

The governor’s caution was echoed by the editor of Noticias, Hector D’Amico. The magazine has published exposes about the provincial police.

“We believe these suspects may well be the killers,” D’Amico said Thursday. “But we are still waiting for the motive. We think someone higher up than this gang ordered the crime. What this case has shown is that the police operate with incredible impunity.”

The officers arrested Wednesday are the former No. 2 police official in Pinamar, the town where Cabezas was killed, and his wife. Investigators believe that the pair--Gustavo Prellezo and Maria Silvia Belawski--and other police officials protected a network of drug dealers, burglars and armed robbers that operated on the Atlantic Coast, according to news reports and sources close to the case. A third officer was arrested last week.

The suspects are believed to have targeted the photographer because he and a reporter threatened the gang’s activities by working on a story about home invasions. The gang allegedly organized an early morning abduction by three carloads of assailants. Witnesses testified that the police station in Pinamar ignored phone calls about suspicious vehicles outside the party before the killing.

Reflecting the magnitude of the case, Duhalde himself received tips leading to the arrest of the couple, who allegedly obtained information on Cabezas from police records a month before the slaying.

Nonetheless, the editors of Noticias and other analysts argue that the investigators have not caught the masterminds. They doubt that the mid- and low-ranking police officers jailed so far orchestrated the elaborate campaign of false leads that has obstructed the investigation.

One informant gave investigators a tape-recording that the killers purportedly made of the victim’s pleas for mercy. The tape was determined to be a fake.

D’Amico said the investigators should pursue theories pointing to high-ranking police officials and others.