Top Chile court orders Fujimori sent to Peru
Government plans to extradite former president as soon as possibleSANTIAGO, Chile - Chile's Supreme Court on Friday ruled that former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori must be extradited to face human rights and corruption charges in Peru.
The ruling is final and cannot be appealed.
Justice Alberto Chaigneau said the court's criminal panel approved the extradition on two human rights and five corruption charges stemming from Fujimori's 1990-2000 rule.
"In all, the extradition has been approved for seven of the 13 charges" filed by the Peruvian government in its extradition request, Chaigneau said.
He said reaching an agreement on the ruling "was much easier than expected" for the five member of the panel. He did not elaborate.
The government plans to extradite the 69-year-old former ruler to Peru as soon as possible.
Under house arrestA court official was traveling to Fujimori's condominium just north of Santiago, where he remains under house arrest, to inform him of the decision.
Friday's decision by the top court reversed an earlier ruling by a lower-court judge who in July rejected the extradition saying the Peruvian government had not presented enough evidence to back the charges against Fujimori.
The human rights charges approved by the court stem from the 1993 death-squad killing of nine students and one professor at La Cantuta University, and the 1991 killings of 15 people at Barrios Altos, a working-class neighborhood.
Chaigneau said the corruption charges accepted by the court included alleged payoffs to members of congress to support government projects and illegal tapping of telephone calls.
Fujimori arrived in Chile in November 2005 ending a five-year exile in Japan, where he had fled as his decade-old government collapsed amid a corruption scandal. The Peruvian government quickly requested his extradition.
During his stay here, Fujimori repeatedly denied the charges against him, calling them politically motivated.
The former president, who holds both Peruvian and Japanese nationalities, also ran unsuccessfully for the Japanese Senate.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20904497/
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