Pinochet should have stood trial, Allende says

Madrid, Dec 12: The daughter of Chile's late President Salvador Allende, who was ousted by Augusto Pinochet, has said she was comforted by the fact the former dictator died pursued by the courts but wished he had been convicted.

''To the end he was surrounded by lawyers trying to defend the indefensible,'' Isabel Allende told national radio in Spain yesterday, following Pinochet's death from heart failure in a Santiago military hospital on Sunday at the age of 91.

Salvador Allende, a Socialist, shot himself during the military coup led by Pinochet, who went on to head a bloody 1973-1990 dictatorship in which more than 3,000 people were killed or disappeared and 28,000 tortured.

Isabel Allende, a cousin of the well-known novelist of the same name, went into exile in Mexico after the coup but is now a member of Chile's parliament for the Socialist Party, which once again governs the country.

''I would have preferred that the courts finished their work, I wish there had been a ruling, I wish he had been condemned,'' Allende told television in Spain, which she is visiting.

''I think it would have been healthier in some way and it hurts me ... because as a country, in the end ... we didn't carry out final justice.'' Pinochet, the most notorious of the military leaders who dominated South America through much of the Cold War, narrowly escaped extradition so Spain for human rights abuses in 2000 but died facing charges of kidnapping and torture.

Thousands of Chileans danced in the streets of the capital to celebrate his death this weekend, while his supporters wept outside the hospital where he died.

''At this moment my thoughts are with so many of our dead, certainly my father, but I think of all our people who were disappeared, tortured, murdered,'' Allende said.

REUTERS