MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Eight Chilean army officers indicted for role in 1973 slayings.

A Chilean court on Monday ordered the arrest of eight former military officers allegedly linked to the abduction and summary execution of 12 people detained at the onset of Augusto Pinochet's coup d'etat.

Arrest warrants and indictments in the case were issued by Judge Carlos Urrutia, one of the magistrates appointed by the Supreme Court to investigate human rights violations committed during the 27-year Pinochet regime.

A top the list was retired Gen. Luis Joaquin Ramirez Pineda, who has been held in Buenos Aires since September by order of French authorities probing his role in the 1973 disappearance of a French physician.

Ramirez Pineda was commander of the regiment in charge of the detainees taken on Sept. 11, 1973, from La Moneda, as the presidential palace is known. He has denied playing any role in any of the slayings.

According to court testimony and statements made by some of the accused to Santiago daily La Nacion, after the coup Ramirez Pineda ordered the murder of advisors to ousted-President Salvador Allende, as well as that of the French physician, Jorge Klein. Allende died in the coup, reportedly by his own hand.

A retired colonel and six other lower-ranking officers were also indicted.

Two days after the coup, the 12 detainees from La Moneda were taken to an army camp on the northern outskirts of Santiago and summarily executed.

The 12 people killed included former Central Bank chief Jaime Barrios, La Moneda chief of staff Enrique Huerta, two of Allende's physicians, Claudio Jimeno and Klein, and Arsenio Poupin, the former head of the police investigations unit. Seven of Allende's bodyguards were also killed.

Their bodies were never found.

On Sept. 13, 1973, a total of 21 people detained at La Moneda were killed at the army camp in Peldehue, located 30 kilometers (19 miles) north of Santiago. The bodies of nine victims were later found among the skeletal remains of more than 100 people exhumed at a local cemetery.