Chile Awaits Pinochet Ruling

After a six-hour, closed-door session Thursday, a three-judge appeals court said a ruling would be announced Monday on a bid to overturn a murder and kidnapping indictment against former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Last week a crusading judge, Juan Guzman, ordered Pinochet placed under house arrest for allegedly planning and organizing the deaths and possibly also the disappearances of 77 leftists and unionists.

They were victims of a so-called "Death Caravan," a military squad that flew around Chile in a helicopter in the weeks after Pinochet's Sept. 11, 1973, coup.

The appeals judges decided Tuesday that until the appeal was heard the house arrest order was suspended.

The appeal presented by Pinochet's lawyers seeks to block Guzman's order on grounds of irregularities — including not waiting for physical and psychological tests. He cannot be tried if he is declared mentally ill.

The defense also protests that Guzman indicted Pinochet without first permitting the mental and neurological tests he had ordered Pinochet to undergo to determine his fitness to stand trial.

"No one can be indicted without being allowed to state his case before a judge," Pinochet's chief lawyer Pablo Rodriguez said as he left the closed door court session.

Lawyer Carmen Hertz, who is the widow of one of the victims of the caravan, said that two questionnaires sent by Guzman to Pinochet must be considered as the pre-indictment interrogation.

The verdict of the three judges can be appealed to the country's top tribunal, the Supreme Court. That court has already sanctioned Guzman for sending a letter of support to one of the lawyers bidding to put Pinochet on trial.

Anti-Pinochet protesters outside the court reacted angrily as they saw Rodriguez, and started chanting "Assassin! Assassin!" Two women spat at the lawyer, who walked away.

Elsewhere in the city, police said five masked men tossed Molotov cocktails at the state prosecutors office — a plaintiff in the complaints against Pinochet. Damage was minimal and the attackers fled.

The detention order against Pinochet, 85, the patriarch of the military, has sparked concern within Chilean right-wing groups and the armed forces, which wield enormous power in this South American nation of 15 million people.

President Ricardo Lagos, after meeting Tuesday with the commanders in chief of the military to discuss the order to arrest Pinochet, Wednesday said he would call a meeting of the National Security Council once the courts ruled on the appeal.

In the same courthouse as the appeal hearing, the widow of an American filmmaker killed during Pinochet's regime filed a criminal complaint against him, which brought to 189 the number of criminal complaints faced by Pinochet.

Horman is the widow of Charles Horman, an American filmmaker killed one week after the coup led by Pinochet. His case was the subject of the film Missing, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek.

Speaking in English and Spanish, Joyce Horman said she decided to file the complaint after documents declassified by the Clinton administration brought new information on her husband's case.

More than 3,000 people died or disappeared under Pinochet's authoritarian regime in which witch hunts of leftists were common. Tens of thousands of Chileans fled the country.

Pinochet had been regarded as largely untouchable in Chile. A decade before he stepped down, Pinochet rewrote Chile's Constitution, giving any past president who had served at least six years the right to become "senator for life," which carries lifetime immunity.

Pinochet returned to Chile from Britain in March after spending 503 days under house arrest near London. He was detained in Britain in October 1998 at the request of a Spanish judge who wanted to try him on charges of torture, but Britain ruled he was too old and sick to be tried.

He escaped extradition to Madrid after Britain's ruling, but this August lost his immunity in a ruling by the Supreme Court.