The Spanish judge seeking the extradition of Gen Augusto Pinochet said yesterday he had proof of more than 40 cases of torture and assassination against the former dictator since 1988.
Judge Baltasar Garzon, who ordered Gen Pinochet's arrest in London last October, issued a court document saying he had evidence of 33 new cases of torture and murder during Gen Pinochet's rule after 1988 to add to previously existing cases.
Britain's law lords ruled on Wednesday that while Gen Pinochet's arrest was legal, he was not answerable to human rights abuses before 1988, the year a UN convention on torture became part of British law.
Judge Garzon criticised the ruling as "inhumane". He said in the court papers that family members of those who disappeared during Gen Pinochet's rule had the right to know the whereabouts of their loved ones - regardless of the date they disappeared.
The latest papers were sent to Britain to give additional information to the government which must decide whether extradition is possible. They were sent in response to a request by British prosecutors who urged Judge Garzon to prove charges of conspiracy to torture and to show that people had been tortured as a consequence of a policy of systematic and generalised repression.
In the document, Judge Garzon gave detailed and at times graphic accounts of more than 40 cases of torture and murder during Gen Pinochet's rule. Thirty-three of the cases were not mentioned in previous court documents.
Many of the victims were forced to undergo interrogation while naked, and many were subjected to various types of electrocution - often to the genitals - and water torture. Other cases cited included those of people forced to sit in their own excrement while being beaten or tortured and at least one man who underwent simulated execution. The vast majority of atrocities linked to Gen Pinochet's administration were alleged to have been committed in the early stages of his rule.
Judge Garzon, a High Court judge who has investigated the atrocities committed during Latin America's "dirty wars" of the 1970s and 1980s, originally requested Gen Pinochet's arrest and extradition on charges of genocide, terrorism and torture.
He said in his extradition warrant that the 83-year-old general was responsible for the deaths or disappearance of more than 3,000 people. In the latest document, Mr Garzon argued that since many of the disappeared had not reappeared, an additional 1,198 cases of forced disappearance of people could also be included in the charges against Gen Pinochet.
In Britain, Amnesty International spokesman, Mr Neil Durkin, said: "It's still too early to be sure what the legal position on these new cases is but we await the details with great interest."
A Crown Prosecution Service spokeswoman confirmed that "additional information" had been received from Spain although she refused to comment further.
Nevertheless, it is understood that charges before the law lords were draft versions and that new ones could be added if they conformed to the law lords' ruling.