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Suit filed against former US secretary of state Kissinger over Chilean killing
( 2001-09-11 10:38 ) (7 )

The family of Chile's former army chief filed suit in federal court in Washington Monday against former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, accusing him of plotting the general's 1970 assassination, a court clerk said.

The suit alleges that General Rene Schneider died after a botched kidnapping attempt in Chile organized and paid for by the Central Intelligence Agency under instructions from then-president Richard Nixon and Kissinger, according to a report Sunday by CBS television.

CBS said the White House was determined to help launch a coup to prevent Salvador Allende from assuming the Chilean presidency after narrowly winning the September 4, 1970 presidential election. Schneider, who pledged his support to Allende as the democratically elected president, stood in the way.

Coup plotters attempted to kidnap Schneider on October 22, 1970 and shot him when the general reached for his weapon in self-defense. He died two days later in Santiago's Military Hospital, according to CBS.

Kissinger, Nixon's national security adviser at the time and later secretary of state for both Nixon and his Republican successor Gerald Ford, has denied involvement in Schneider's death.

A 1975 US Senate investigation established that the United States had indeed backed a coup which eventually brought down Allende three years later and set up the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

However, Kissinger testified before the Senate hearing that he had cut off all support for the coup plotters the week before Schneider was murdered.

A high-ranking State Department official referred to previously declassified documents about the situation in Chile during the 1960s and '70s, saying "the documents speak for themselves."

"This is part of a historical record," the official said.

The court action against Kissinger in Washington follows requests from several countries for testimony from the former secretary of state concerning events in Latin America when he was in office.

Officials in Argentina reportedly want to question Kissinger on how much he knew about Plan Condor, under which South American military dictators cooperated against political opponents in the 1970s and 1980s.

Judges in France and Chile are also seeking to question Kissinger on issues of human rights abuses in Chile during Pinochet's dictatorship.