MIAMI:Chilean could be Pinochet witness

[Judi Lynn]

Posted on Mon, Oct. 13, 2003

MIAMI
Chilean could be Pinochet witness
Federal agencies are at odds over deporting an ex- military officer who could be a witness against former dictator Augusto Pinochet.
BY ALFONSO CHARDY
[e-mail]


He was a major prize in the federal government's aggressive campaign to expel foreigners accused of human rights abuses abroad.
U.S. immigration agents in Miami kept hinting earlier this year that Armando Fernández Larios, a former Chilean military officer living in Kendall, was about to be arrested and face extradition to Argentina.

Authorities there want to question Fernández Larios in the Buenos Aires car-bomb killing of a Chilean general and supporter of Salvador Allende, the Chilean president ousted in a 1973 military coup.

But high-ranking U.S. officials in Washington, D.C., have repeatedly prohibited local agents from picking up Fernández Larios.
Now The Herald has learned why.

Fernández Larios, federal officials believe, could be a key witness against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in the notorious 1976 assassination of Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier.
(snip)

(snip) Pinochet's intelligence chief, Gen. Manuel Contreras, has been convicted in Chile of masterminding Letelier's assassination. In his 1987 plea agreement, Fernández Larios admitted he found out where Letelier lived and worked. He provided the information to Michael Townley, a U.S. citizen who worked for the Chilean intelligence service run by Contreras.

Townley attached an explosive to Letelier's car and two Cuban exiles he recruited for the operation detonated the bomb, killing Letelier and his U.S. associate, Ronni Moffitt. (snip/...)

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/6999412.htm

[emad]

1. Plenty of evidence against the old bastard in the UK but

most of it is in semi-official protection as a result of Thatcher's intervention to gag official secrets concerning the Falklands War.

I expect it won't be until Thatcher finally pops her clogs that the UK govt will release documents that will nail down Pinochet.

Some material was to be released in the late 1990s when Pinochet was busted in the UK and held under a Spanish extradition warrant. However, much was deemed to be so embarrasing to the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret that it was buried under Official Secrets Act stuff. The connections are via the QM's ties to Goering and the lengths she went to to hide that link.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. If it was buried, how come you know about it?

And how are the Falklands, the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret and Goering connected? And why would that get tied in with Pinochet?