Chilean court convicts three former Pinochet agents in 1976 car bomb attack

Fifty years after Gen Augusto Pinochet ’s secret police detonated a car bomb in the heart of Washington DC, killing Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean minister and ambassador to the US, and his American colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt, a Santiago court has convicted three former agents of Moffitt’s murder. Judge Paola Plaza, a special minister for human rights in Chile , sentenced Pedro Espinoza, José Zara, and Raúl Iturriaga to 15 years in prison for their roles in the killing of Moffitt, 25. All three men were agents of the Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (Dina), Pinochet’s feared secret police which hunted down opponents at home and abroad. Espinoza and Iturriaga – who is serving more than 500 years’ prison time for a litany of human rights atrocities – were being held at an exclusive facility outside Santiago , but Zara had been released in August last year having completed a 15-year jail term. He has now been arrested once more. Juan Gabriel Valdés, who served as Chile’s ambassador in Washington DC until March this year and knew Letelier and Moffitt during his own exile in the US capital, posted on social media: “Justice took 49 years and 97 days to arrive,” remembering Moffitt’s cheerful greeting each morning at the Institute of Policy Studies where she worked with Letelier. On 21 September 1976, the pair were driving to work when the bomb exploded as they rounded a bend on Massachusetts Avenue Northwest. …