A Rome court on Thursday quashed an Italian arrest warrant for a Uruguayan ex-navy intelligence officer accused of murdering four Italians in South America's notorious Operation Condor.
But the man, Nestor Jorge Fernandez Troccoli, remained in jail on a Uruguayan warrant which has yet to be examined by Italian judges.
Troccoli, 60, was arrested at Christmas in the southern Italian city of Salerno, where he has been living for several years.
He appeared Thursday before a court which assesses the validity of arrest warrants.
Troccoli, who is now also an Italian citizen, denied involvement in the death of the four Italians.
He said he never took part in murder or torture.
But he admitted hooding prisoners and making them stand up for hours without food.
Troccoli's lawyer said the court ruling ''shows my client was right to come to Italy where judges are willing to listen to a defendant's pleas''.
The lawyer said Thursday's ruling would have ''great weight'' when he presents an appeal against the Uruguayan ruling to Italy's highest court of appeals, the Cassation Court.
Troccoli was one of 140 people named in arrest warrants issued by Rome prosecutors investigating the deaths of 25 Italian citizens in the decades-old South American operation to hunt down leftists.
The others are former government chiefs and military and intelligence officers in seven South American countries. Rome prosecutor Giancarlo Capaldo is set to ask the Italian justice ministry to forward extradition requests to the countries whose military regimes sent teams to kill fugitive dissidents.
The Brazilian justice ministry has said it was unlikely to grant such requests.
The other countries concerned - Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru - have yet to respond.
Capaldo started his probe in December 1998 on the basis of suits filed by the relatives of the Italians who 'disappeared' during Operation Condor, which ran from 1975 to the mid 1980s.
At least one of the 25 was not a leftist militant.
Among those named by Capaldo on suspicion of multiple abduction and murder are former Argentine military leader Jorge Rafael Videla; ex-Uruguay junta chief Jorge Maria Bordaberry and his successor Gregorio Alvarez; former Peruvian president Francisco Morales; former Peruvian premier Pedro Richter Prada; three former Argentine ministers; and a former Paraguayan minister. Six more were originally named, including former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Another suspect is the former head of Chile's secret service, Manuel Contreras, who was tried and convicted in absentia in Rome in 1999 of the attempted murder in Rome in 1975 of Chilean Christian Democrat leader Bernardo Leighton.
Operation Condor is believed to have claimed thousands of lives and its shadow has not yet been shaken off, South American observers say.
There have also been investigations into Operation Condor in France and Spain.
In 1990 a French court sentenced a former Argentine navy officer to life imprisonment in absentia for his involvement in the disappearance of two French nuns.
An Argentinian junta-era military officer was extradited to Spain in 2003.
