BUENOS AIRES:Two brothers, aged seven and nine, told psychiatrists they slowly and coldly tortured a two-year-old girl to death - a revelation that has Argentinians debating whether to do away with a law prohibiting the prosecution of minors for terrible crimes.
Judge Marta Pascual said the children confessed to killing neighbour Milagros Belizan in a shantytown south of the capital.
"They understood her pain but it did not move them," said Ms Pascual, a youth judge for Buenos Aires's Lomas de Zomara district, after meeting psychiatrists who examined the boys. "In some form, it gave them pleasure."
Milagros disappeared from her home in the Almirante Brown neighbourhood on Sunday. Her family found her body in a vacant lot 10 blocks away. She had been stripped naked, beaten and strangled with telephone cord left around her neck. The discovery prompted neighbours to attack an adult suspected of the crime before the two boys confessed.
Argentinian law prohibits the prosecution of anyone under 18. Instead, such juveniles are generally held in youth homes until they reach 18, when they are released without further punishment.
Sunday's killing has many Argentines calling for stiffer punishments - including prosecuting the boys once they come of age.
"There's the idea among Argentine lawyers, psychologists and sociologists that the child is always the victim and can never be the victimiser," constitutional lawyer Gregorio Badeni said. "But if it were up to the people living in the shantytown where that little girl was murdered, they would kill the two boys."
Others disagreed that child killers should be tried like adults.
"These two boys are victims just like the poor girl they killed," family psychologist Cristina Castillo said. "Even if the boys knew what they were doing, they couldn't be aware of the consequences of their actions. They couldn't know they were going to kill the girl."
Authorities have not released the boys' identities, but said they were neighbours of the girl, who lived in a wood-slat shack.
- (AP)