US files: CIA suspected Pinochet in 1976 assassination

The CIA had evidence that Chile's military dictator Augusto Pinochet ordered the brazen assassination in Washington of an exiled former Chilean foreign minister, the diplomat's son said Thursday.

Orlando Letelier and his assistant Ronni Moffitt were killed on September 21, 1976 when a bomb exploded under their car as they drove through Washington's leafy Embassy Row.

Pinochet, who seized power in Chile in a 1973 military coup, has long been suspected as the guiding hand behind the attack.

Declassified US documents turned over to Chile this week add weight to the theory.

"This is the first time there are documents that give evidence of that," the diplomat's son, Juan Pablo Letelier, told Chile's Tele13Radio.

US Secretary of State John Kerry handed 1,000 declassified US documents related to the sensitive case to Chile's President Michelle Bachelet during a conference in Chile on Monday and Tuesday.

She passed them on to Letelier's son, a Chilean senator.

Among the documents, according to Letelier, was a memo to the White House from then secretary of state George Shultz "which reports that there is a conclusive CIA document on Pinochet's responsibility, in which he orders my father's assassination."

Letelier was foreign minister under the government of Salvador Allende from 1970 to 1973 and his assassination is considered the first foreign terrorist act on US soil.

Pinochet, who died in 2006, was never tried for Letelier's murder, although he was tried for some of the estimated 3,200 deaths and disappearances under his military regime.

Source; AFP