Chilean ex-leader Allende’s remains to be exhumed

Chile: The remains of former Chilean president Salvador Allende was to be exhumed Monday in hopes of finally determining whether he committed suicide or was executed by the military during a 1973 coup.

Chile remains locked in a decades-old controversy over Allende’s death in his presidential palace on September 11, 1973, in the midst of the coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power.

The official version of events was that Allende killed himself with an assault rifle that was a gift from then-Cuban president Fidel Castro, as the presidential palace was under attack from the air and ground.

An inquiry was launched earlier this year to determine the cause of death. His remains will be exhumed from a Santiago cemetery and analyzed by forensic experts.

Neither the weapon nor bullets were recovered and Pinochet’s military regime prevented Allende’s family from seeing his corpse after the coup. There was no criminal investigation into his death.

A Chilean prosecutor announced the inquiry in January, as part of an investigation into the deaths of 725 unprobed human rights complaints against Pinochet’s 1973-1990 military dictatorship.

Santiago, Monday, AFP