A Chilean court today decided to reopen the investigation into the death of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.
This was announced by Radio Cooperativa.
Last December, the Chilean judge Paola Plaza closed the case concerning Neruda's death after rejecting the requests from part of the Communist Party (PC) and the family of the Nobel Prize winner for Literature for a reopening of the investigation in order to verify whether there were responsible for the death that occurred a few days after the coup in 1973.
Plaza defined the reasons with which the parties asked for further investigations as "irrelevant" and assured that "the State has used all available resources to discover the truth, including the intervention of national and foreign experts and the use of unprecedented technologies in the investigations criminal investigations, as well as
obtaining testimonies, various types of expert reports, searching for documents and police reports".
Representing Neruda's grandchildren, the lawyer Magaly Reyes, the judge had asked to reinstate the case for three main reasons: the death certificate, which "records a non-existent cause of death, namely 'tumor cachexia'";
the story of the poet's former driver, Manuel Araya, who declared that he suspected murder, and the inconclusive statements of the then officials of the Santa Maria Clinic, where he died on
September 23, 1973.
Araya, with Manuel Luna, the PC's lawyer, had asked to carry out a meta-expertise "that would allow us to correctly interpret the results of the expert opinion carried out for this case by scientists from the Universities of McMaster and Copenhagen".
Neruda died one day before traveling to Mexico, where he agreed to go into exile with his wife Matilde Urrutia.
The poet had been admitted to the Santa Maria Clinic in Santiago - more for safety reasons than for the prostate cancer that afflicted him - after his house had been brutally searched by the military.
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