Chile judge says Pinochet had false passports

A judge yesterday accused Augusto Pinochet of having false passports, deepening the former Chilean dictator's legal woes three days after he was placed under house arrest in a human rights case.

Sergio Munoz, a special judge who is investigating multimillion-dollar secret accounts that Pinochet, 89, held in the 1990s at Riggs Bank in Washington, made the accusation in a court filing.

The discovery of the Riggs accounts in July last year led to investigations of tax evasion and fraud, on top of the dozens of investigations Pinochet already faces for human rights violations during his 1973-1990 regime.

Mr Munoz, along with a dozen police officers, raided Pinochet's private office in an exclusive area of Santiago on Thursday and interviewed Pinochet employees, seeking false documents and proof the retired general had bank accounts in other countries besides the US.

Pinochet's legal defence team decried the search as unconstitutional and filed a complaint against Mr Munoz in a higher court.

Mr Munoz retaliated with a filing that said the raid was justified because "the court has in its power four passports presumably extended to Augusto Pinochet under false identities." He did not say when or how the court obtained the passports, nor whether the passports were Chilean or issued by other countries.

The Riggs accounts were discovered last year as part of a US Senate investigation on money laundering.

More than 3,000 people were killed in political violence and 27,000 were tortured during the Pinochet era.

The only time Pinochet came close to trial in a human rights case, the Supreme Court threw out the charges saying his mild dementia made him too ill to stand trial. (Reuters)

But this week the Supreme Court ruled that Pinochet can face murder and kidnapping charges in the death and disappearance of 10 leftists in the 1970s as part of Operation Condor, a campaign by South American dictators to get rid of dissidents.

After the Supreme Court upheld the indictment against Pinochet in Operation Condor, he was placed under house arrest on Wednesday.