'Looted art' vanishes

ARGENTINE authorities said they are pressing their search for an 18th-century Italian portrait believed to have been looted 80 years ago from a Jewish collector by a fugitive Nazi officer who settled in Argentina after the Second World War.

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The federal public prosecutor's office said a police raid on a sea side villa south of Buenos Aires had turned up potentially relevant German documents and prints from the 1940s, but not the sought-after stolen painting.

The developments reopened a shadowy chapter in the history of the South American nation, which sheltered scores of Nazis who fled Europe to avoid prosecution for war crimes, including high-ranking party members and notorious architects of the Holocaust such as Adolf Eichmann.