SANTIAGO -- A Chilean judge handed down a seven-year prison term to Paul Schaefer, the former German army medic who founded and led the Dignity Colony enclave, for the 1974 slaying of an agent of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship.

Two Schaefer associates, Kurt Schnellenkamp and Rudolf Cöllen, got probation for their role in concealing the murder of Miguel Angel Becerra Hidalgo, an agent of DINA, the secret police of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, judicial authorities said.

Schaefer, 87, is currently serving multiple sentences for storing war weapons, torturing German settlers in the "Dignity Colony," and for sexually abusing children in the enclave.

Now under government supervision, Dignity Colony was founded in 1961 by Schaefer, who had been a nurse in the German army during World War II and was under investigation in his homeland for pedophilia at the time of his departure for Chile.

Schaefer, who claimed religious inspiration for his project, ran the enclave as a dictator, separating parents from children and imposing a harsh labor regimen.

In 2005, after almost eight years as a fugitive, Schaefer was captured in Argentina and expelled to Chile.

During the 1973-1990 Pinochet dictatorship, Schaefer put the colony at the disposition of the junta, which not only used the enclave as a concentration camp but also hid caches of explosives, machine guns, rocket-launchers and even surface-to-air missiles in Schaefer's domain of more than 13,000 hectares (32,000 acres).

Miguel Angel Becerra Hidalgo was a right-winger who took part in terrorism against the Socialist government of President Salvador Allende and then joined Pinochet's DINA secret police after the bloody army coup of Sept. 11, 1973.

As stated in the trial, Becerra was 33 years old when he was poisoned in late July 1974 inside the Dignity Colony, and his body appeared days later at a place nearby where he had been taken by Schnellenkamp and Cöllen, who tried to make it look like the man had been run over by a car.

The motive of the crime was that Becerra did not agree with the torture and mistreatment of political prisoners.

Judge Jorge Zepeda also ordered Schaefer and his accomplices to pay an total compensation of 170 million pesos ($257,000) to relatives of the victim.

Chile's official truth commission said in a 1991 report that the Pinochet regime killed roughly 3,000 people, while a 2004 document from another blue-ribbon panel found that tens of thousands had been tortured. EFE