The owner of Argentina's biggest newspaper has been arrested on suspicion ofusing false documents in the adoption of her children whom rights groups suspect were stolen from leftists during the last military dictatorship.
Court officials said Ernestina Herrera de Noble, 77, owner of Clarin newspaper, would be questioned by Federal Judge Roberto Marquevich who ordered her arrest late yesterday. She was being held at police headquarters in the capital.
Other court sources said her adoptive children Felipe and Marcela, both 26, had been ordered to give blood samples for DNA checks.
Rights groups have searched for hundreds of babies stolen from detainees and often illegally adopted by military couples during the 1976-1983 "Dirty War."
Clarin, one of the biggest selling Spanish-language newspapers in the world, blasted the detention as "arbitrary," called it an "illegal and flagrant abuse" of Herrera.
The paper said the arrest was linked to a 1995 case backed by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a rights group that has campaigned for decades to discover the fates of up to 30,000 suspected leftists who disappeared during the 1976-1983 dictatorship.
It also pointed out that two similar cases lodged against Herrera had been dismissed by the courts years ago.