FRANCE TO TRY 17 PINOCHET REGIME LEADERS

CHILE: REGIME LEADERS / MISNA ON Ladysilvia; A Paris court shall try 17 leaders of the Pinichet dictatorship in absentia for the disappearance of four French citizens during the period from 1973 and 1975 said the French judiciary.

The trial is set to begin at the latest in 2008. A judicial inquiry into the case had already started in 1998 and included Augusto Pinochet and general Javier Secondo Emilio Palacios Ruhumann - who led the attack against the presidential palace of La Moneda in September 1973 and who like Pinochet has died - among those being investigated.

Others to be tried by the French court made up by a people’s jury include general Manuel Contreras, founder of the secret police of the regime, ’DINA’, and Paul Shaefer, founder of the Colonia Dignidad, the prisoners camp in the Andes. If found guilty, the defendants could face life imprisonment though their extradition to France remains highly unlikely.

Nevertheless, their ability to travel abroad could be compromised.

The French victims were Georges Klein, 27 years old, medical doctor and advisor to president Allende, who was arrested on September 11, 1973 in La Moneda at the time of the coup; the priest Etienne Marie Louis Pesle, 49 years, member of the Socialist and Christians for Socialism party, arrested about a week after the coup; Alphonse Chanfreau Oyarce, 24 years old, and Jean-Yves Caludet Fernández both members of the ’Movimento de la izquierda revolucionaria’ (Mir), arrested by ’Dina’ in 1974 in Chile and Buenos Aires respectively [AB]

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