Key facts
- Three former agents of Chile's secret police were convicted for their roles in the 1976 car bombing.
- The bombing killed former minister Orlando Letelier and his colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt in Washington D.C.
- The convicted agents, Pedro Espinoza, José Zara, and Raúl Iturriaga, were sentenced to 15 years in prison.
- The agents belonged to the Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (Dina), Gen. Augusto Pinochet's secret police.
- The court found the agents planned and executed extrajudicial murders abroad.
Fifty years after the car bombing that killed former Chilean minister Orlando Letelier and his colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt in Washington D.C., a Santiago court has convicted three former agents of Gen. Augusto Pinochet's secret police for their involvement. Judge Paola Plaza sentenced Pedro Espinoza, José Zara, and Raúl Iturriaga, all agents of the feared Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (Dina), to 15 years in prison for the murder of Moffitt.
The brazen attack occurred on September 21, 1976, when a bomb detonated in Letelier and Moffitt's car as they drove to work. The court found that the agents, under the direction of notorious Dina chief Manuel Contreras, devised a plan for extrajudicial killings on foreign soil and conducted surveillance on Letelier.
Several high-ranking Chilean military officials and US citizen Michael Townley, a Dina collaborator, had previously been sentenced in connection with the case. However, in 2012, a Santiago appeals court ruled that Moffitt's case should be reopened because the perpetrators were Chilean nationals.
Rebecca Karpen, Moffitt's niece, stated that the sentences represent a victory for families fighting for lives ruined by the Pinochet regime. Juan Pablo Letelier, the former ambassador's son, urged the US to continue pursuing justice against those responsible for the killings.
Orlando Letelier had become a vocal critic of the dictatorship while in exile in the US. He was stripped of his Chilean citizenship shortly before his assassination, having recently addressed a large anti-Pinochet rally. The killings strained U.S.-Chilean relations, leading to congressional investigations and an arms embargo against Chile. The Dina was subsequently disbanded by Pinochet's junta, though it was later replaced by a similar intelligence agency.