CHILE: A retired army officer has become the first Chilean to publicly confess to a role in the killing of aides to the late President Salvador Allende and disposal of their bodies, after the coup staged by former dictator Augusto Pinochet, according to a newspaper yesterday.
In an interview in El Mercurio, Eliseo Cornejo said he was a low-ranking officer following orders and that he did not play a direct role in the killings, and later exhumation of the bodies.
He said he drove the vehicle that escorted a group of men, arrested at the presidential palace during the 1973 coup two days earlier, to a military base where he witnessed their execution and burial in a mass grave.
Five years later, in 1978, his commanders ordered him to identify the burial spot. Officials then dug up the rotting bodies and loaded them onto a military helicopter, which flew off to an unknown destination, he said.
"They take them out of the vehicle, one by one, just like I said to the judge, and they are executed," Cornejo was quoted as saying, recalling events 30 years ago. "There was an immense hole there . . . and they threw them in." A Chilean judge indicted Cornejo, now 62, and four other ex-military officers on Wednesday for the crime.
Cornejo has already testified to the judge investigating the disappearance of several professionals and personal bodyguards who worked with Allende, the socialist leader who killed himself the day he was ousted. - (Reuters)