MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

If Pinochet had secret accounts, we'll investigate.

Chilean President Ricardo Lagos said Thursday that if there is proof former dictator Augusto Pinochet kept secret accounts in a Washington bank, then an investigation should be launched in Chile.

A U.S. Senate document cited in Thursday's edition of The Washington Post said investigators concluded Riggs Bank helped Pinochet hide as much as $8 million while he was under house arrest in Britain pending possible extradition to Spain, where a judge wanted to try him for crimes against humanity committed under his 1973-1990 regime.

At a meeting with the foreign press on Thursday, Lagos said that if the Post's allegations prove correct and the nature of the accounts is established, "we would need to appoint a commission here (in Chile) to investigate." "First, we have to determine the nature of the accounts and whether they really contain such amounts," that is, between $4 million and $8 million, according to the U.S. newspaper.

Asked about the agreement, struck early in the transition to democracy, not to investigate matters related to the military dictatorship, Lagos replied, "Yes, fine, but these accounts are recent." Pinochet was arrested in London on Oct. 16, 1998, after Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon sought his arrest and extradition to Spain to face charges of torture, terrorism and genocide.

The Post cites a U.S. Senate investigation of the Riggs Bank, which in May had to pay a $25 million fine for violating money-laundering laws in its dealings with the Saudi Arabian Embassy and Equatorial Guinea President Teodoro Obiang.

Pinochet's son said Thursday there is no truth to the Senate investigators' allegations. In statements published in the Santiago daily El Mercurio, Pinochet's youngest son, Marco Antonio, denied the newspaper reports, saying the very same charges had been refuted in 1999.

The younger Pinochet said Garzon had traveled to the Bahamas to look for his father's "secret accounts" and had found none.

"What is most annoying is that (the media) reports at length on the accounts my father is supposed to have, but when it's discovered they don't exist, that everything is false, nothing is said," he added.

According to The Washington Post, the U.S. Senate investigators who spent more than a year examining the activities of Riggs Bank found that the institution used companies and offshore accounts under fictitious names to keep the money from being traced to Pinochet.

The report cited by the Post said Pinochet kept between $4 million and $8 million in several personal and corporate accounts at the bank.